Two Tales of Terror
by Clayton Overstreet
Summary: In "The Bone Eater" a thief unwittingly steals from the sidhe. In "Little Girl, Big Knife" it's the end of the world complete with a dying sun and unspeakable monsters, but one young lady isn't going down without a fight.


I do own these stories. They are original and mine.

**Two tales of Terror**

**The Bone Eater**

**By, Clayton Overstreet**

**Left hand. Middle finger. First joint. **

The basis of panic is the feeling of being helpless.

This is something Mary Wayland knew well. She had been helpless a lot as a kid. If asked she would say the details do not matter. She was born poor, black, and in the kind of neighborhood rich people actively drove around. Mary had been victimized by people of all ages in a variety of ways and so had everyone else she knew for generations. If one form of it missed you, it was probably because the people doing it were busy performing it on someone else and just had not gotten around to you, yet.

When you become an adult you are supposed to be able to defend yourself. To know what to do and be able to do it. To fight back. Instead in many ways it makes it worse when you cannot. Death comes on swift wings. Terror is a slower process and so much worse than the mere cessation of life.

Her mother had loved her, but was busy. She worked hard all the time usually cleaning other people's houses. She did her best to keep food on the table most days. She left Mary with people she probably should not have and ignored some things she knew no child should go through because she had no other choice. Given that she was fourteen when Mary was born and was very tight lipped about who her baby's father had been or why she never talked to or about her own parents Mary had not complained too much or pressed for details. She could not expect too much sympathy and unsurprisingly soon stopped giving much in return.

Unlike her mother though, she did not go through life on the assumption that things could not get better. Lacy Wayland had been a good god fearing woman. Good for Mary in many ways. A lesser woman would have likely gotten an abortion or dumped her newborn in a trashcan. It happened.

Mary, after a brief innocence available only to the very young, was not. The first time she had openly stolen something and learned the lesson that shaped her life was in preschool. There was a lost and found box. Toys, loose change, and things were often in it. In fact some of them had been there longer than Mary had been alive. Put in by overworked teachers who were not paid enough to last out the year. Mostly volunteers. Some of the things in there would likely have caught the interest of antiques dealers and collectors and probably could have funded a better school for years to come.

Only nobody was supposed to touch the box. You were supposed to go to a teacher if you lost something and described an item and then they would check the box. Of course the kids peeked. For many it was like looking in the window of a toy store. Full of things they would never own. Some of the perennial classics included a toy plastic gun (not for kids, we don't want them playing with guns), a Malibu Barbie, a pink toy skunk, and a firecracker. The rest were mostly things like an individual Lego, a plastic dog, and the head off a t-rex toy missing the lower jaw. All mixed in with socks and panties left behind and occasionally appropriated when another kid had an accident and needed something to wear for the day.

Mary stole the gun first. It was cool and forbidden and she wanted it. The toy had been stolen many times over the years. Young kids though tend to lack the capacity for lying and after a few threats and a bit of intimidation it had always been reclaimed by some teacher and put back in the box while the offending party was appropriately or sometimes viciously punished for the theft and learned n important lesson about not taking things that did not belong to them.

Mary never talked. She had learned to keep quiet about bad things and knew that as long as nobody told anyone then nobody got into trouble and they likely could do it again. Driving the point home the teachers, when nobody had come forward, had been completely impotent to do anything about it. Nobody to punish. They tried making the whole class write lines and stay after school, but still nobody copped out.

A week later Mary had a Barbie and stuffed skunk and the box was put away on a high shelf. Her mother noticed the toys. Mary said someone had left them out on the street in a box that said "Free stuff". Likely she would have been in deep trouble if the teachers had bothered telling the parents. She lucked out and none of them bothered.

The second time she stole something was in first grade. A girl at a desk near hers had been reading a book. Mary asked if she could borrow it when the girl was done reading it. Said girl had been very snotty about not sharing. Unfortunately for her she either had a poor memory or terrible detective skills because the book was safely in Mary's backpack and she read it when she got home. Truthfully she was never sure the girl even noticed the book had gone missing.

Lesson learned. Crime pays. If you get away with it. Mary decided to become a thief.

Not an uncommon occupation in her neighborhood. Mostly though the kids who tried it got pinched by the cops on their first go. They did it on the spur of the moment. They bragged. They bought things people noticed or tried selling stuff to people they really should have looked into first. Not Mary though. No, not her. Her mother would have been proud if she had ever known how good she was at it. Mary never told her though. True the only person Jesus had ever personally promised a spot in Heaven had been a convicted thief, but Lacy had always been a little more focused on the commandments.

Her first planned theft had been in an alleyway at age fourteen. Her old plastic gun was spray painted black easily enough and she had an old Halloween mask of a skull. She had been five miles from home and had spent a month tracking the police patrols and keeping an eye out for anyone carrying enough money to be worth it. She netted fifty thousand dollars off of an armored truck picking up cash from a KFC. One driver and the perfect moment for a daytime robbery as he opened the back and put in the money. In broad daylight.

Number two had been a convenience store where she had been chatting up the older man behind the counter. He thought he was getting lucky with a naïve Lolita. She had plans to get the timing of when he put the excess money into the time locked safe. One of them successfully flouted the law. The other had been left wanting.

Mary did not live like a successful thief. Not at first. She was used to a life wanting more. There were things she wanted, but very few she could keep. Money meanwhile stayed fresh and she was able to at least eat well, in private. If her mother noticed she did not actually accuse. Not without definitive proof and Mary soon took a job helping her clean.

It came in handy later. Rich people liked hiring cleaning services and with time and effort by the time she was twenty Mary had five. Under different names and with her as the sole employee. She worked long enough to case the places and then one the plan was in place she became too busy or closed down and could no longer work there. Thankfully rich people rarely made changes and easily hired someone else. So the actual theft would be anywhere from six months to a year later with no obvious ties and Mary, as a general rule, only stole cash or collectables. She tended towards quick smash and grab jobs, in and out before the alarms even alerted the security guards and got them there in time. Usually because it was easy enough o set up a distraction at another house in the neighborhood with the same system/company, usually by duct taping a burner phone set on vibrate to a window.

The cash she kept mostly as cash or wrote off as payment for cleaning big houses that she did not rob from and thus has no records of her or reason to contact her if they ever were robbed. The collectables were not pawned. She kept them in paid up storage lockers. Waiting for when she finally did have her own big house to keep them in. Far away from everything she had ever been born to.

She even paid her taxes. At least on the reported income. Officially she was a mildly successful business woman who had a couple of backers. Unofficially she was her own backer and was a _very_ successful thief. Monetarily she had several hundred thousand in her bank accounts and a couple million stashed in various places. In sheer priceless possessions she had more than most museums.

It was a warm night in July. She had already set off several fake alarm calls in the neighborhood. Watched as the cars drove by, lights flashing. Twice in this house. It was only ten and the function the owner was away at was important. Something about charities and medical supplies and things. Someone had swung by to check it out the first time, but not the second. The phones had not been found yet, not in the dark. At the moment the likely option was some sort of system glitch, prowlers, or some such.

Setting off another one some distance away she hefted her crowbar and forced the ancient oak door open. A black figure on a dark night. The alarm went off for the third time that night. Meanwhile she ambled down the hallway with a large duffle bag slung over her shoulder, snatching things off tables and walls. In the kitchen and upstairs she found the little hidey-holes for wads of cash, hundreds wrapped around each other with rubber bands.

She was almost done after a brief fifteen minutes in the fifteen room building when she saw something glitter on a mantelpiece.

She had almost forgotten about this, though she had dusted it several times. A coin. Roughly the size of a fifty cent piece but thicker and made of silver. Writing in some foreign language along the edge. One side had a detailed human skull on it missing three teeth and the other was blank, like a small mirror. It was kept in a dome of glass on a wooden base.

Mary genteelly pushed it off the mantle and watched the dome shatter before bending down and slipping the coin into the now fairly heavy canvass sack. A less careful thief might have pocketed it, but while she was confident in her diversions, Mary was always mindful of not getting caught with the evidence on her. A bag full of baubles was hardly worth twenty years in prison and it was easier to claim innocence when you did not keep them in your actual pockets.

Five minutes later a rental car with license plates of paper covering the real ones drove calmly out of the neighborhood and disappeared.

Mary supposed she should have been tipped off that something was wrong when the theft did not appear in the papers. The Gilroy family was rather well known as philanthropists. The next day the only thing online or in the papers was about their attending a charity function for bone cancer, with no mention of their house being burglarized. Admittedly by comparison the things she had taken were minor to the whole of their wealth, but still.

It was times like this that Mary often wished she actually understood the value of the items she stole. Unfortunately her high school diploma and internet searches might allow her to identify a gold watch, rare wine, or a Faberge egg but for specifics you needed a lot of knowledge she just did not have. When she was independently wealthy she might go to school for it, if only to truly understand the things she did own now. Until then she just had to trust in the buying power of her victims.

Her lack of information did give her a bit of fun in its own way though. While she might not know for sure if a vase she had stolen was Ming or used to be owned by Genghis Khan or was just used as a potty by some English king she could use her imagination. She had jewelry and paintings and things that were all worth fortunes and could have been from anywhere.

So she wondered if the Gilroy family jut did not want to advertise how easily they had been robbed or if they had some secret. Stolen Nazi art? Secret nuclear missile plans behind a painting? A hidden key to the basement where they kept some inbred heir or the bodies of their serial victims? Almost definitely not that interesting, but until she found out it could be anything. And whatever it was, it was all hers.

She was still mentally gloating while lounging in her apartment while lounging in her robe when her mother called. Absently she picked up the phone and said, "Hello mom. What's up?"

"I just wanted to invite you to church tomorrow. It is Sunday."

Mary sighed. "Mom, forget it. I just worked all through last night and I'm not in the mood to get up early and listen to some sermon."

"Mary-Ann Wayland! It's not as if I've been slacking off. My body aches in places you never dreamed missy. But the state of your soul is much more important."

"Mom, I went with you on Easter and for your wedding. Call it a win and move on. Besides I'm not exactly welcome at our local church. The priest won't even shake my hand since he found out I like girls instead of boys." Considering her childhood it was hardly surprising that men were not her cup of tea. She could afford the therapy, but why bother?

"I think he was more upset that he found out because you were making out with his daughter in the confessional."

"Saved time."

"You were fifteen and she was twenty-three… and married."

Yes, Mary had broken more than one commandment. If her mother was right then there was a good chance that one of these days she would enter a church and actually explode. "How's Uncle Danny?"

"He's fine," Lacy said. She had recently married her long time boyfriend who Mary had been calling Uncle Danny since she was ten. While the nickname did make the relationship come across as something out of Shakespeare, her mother had been a little embarrassed about sleeping with a man out of wedlock so the longtime nickname stuck, even if they had finally gotten married.

Mary got up and began picking up her clothing from the night before. Her storage lockers were far apart and nowhere near the neighborhoods stolen from. It really had been a long night and the bag had been pretty heavy by the time she left the house. Then she had to spend a long time carefully checking every item for transmitters. She had lost a whole storage locker once because she had missed something hidden in a jewelry case that looked all the world like a sticker until you peeled it away and revealed the RFID tag inside. It was an exhausting process checking for them, but ultimately worth it.

"You two should go on a real honeymoon. Not a two-day vacation to a hotel."

"We'd love to sweetheart, but you know we can't afford that sort of thing."

"Well I've entered another radio call in show. Maybe I'll be able to send you."

"Mm…"

That sound held meaning. Mary had been able to slip her mother a few bucks over the year, but the woman was justifiably paranoid and officially her daughter should be as poor as she was. Yet Mary had a nicer apartment, better clothes, and went out on dates that were just a bit better than she should be able to think about going, let alone actually going. She was careful, but had shared the leftovers with her mother a few too many times. Three "radio contests' in and Lacy was beginning to question where her daughter's extra cash came from.

It was a toss up if she would turn Mary in. Mary was pretty sure her mother suspected some days she was dealing drugs, prostituting herself, or gambling while Mary wondered if Lacy had occasionally done the same things to make ends meet. No judgment on her part, but her mother practically slept in a black robe and white wig. She would never accept the proceeds of any of that, if she knew for sure where it came from. Meanwhile faking a major win, like anything over a few grand, would attract attention.

It made it very hard for Mary to help take care of her mother. She could have put her up in her own condo easily. All she would have to do was trust Lacy to keep her mouth shut about the ill gotten gains. Something she would not do. Mary really did play the lottery and enter contests. If she won she could launder her own money and buy a few things without raising eyebrows, but unfortunately actually winning such things was a lot harder than faking it. So far the best thing she had been able to do to ease her mother's debts was move out and help pay off her car.

She was going to say something when she picked up her pants and something fell out of her pocket. It fell and landed on her foot with a thump. "Ouch! Son of a bitch!"

"Mary!"

"Uh! Sorry mom. I dropped something on my foot." She bent down and picked it up, recognizing the coin from the night before. Her face reflected back in it and she turned it around to look at the realistic silver skull on the other side. Absently she flipped it with the ringing sound and as it flipped in the air the images seemed to merge, the skull staring out of her own reflected face.

"Are you okay?" Lacy was asking.

Catching it Mary nodded, "Yeah, it just hurt."

"At least you didn't blaspheme," she said. "You're sure—?"

"Bye mom," Mary said, hanging up and setting the phone down. She ran the coin through her fingers. It felt cool and heavy. Solid silver? Probably. Mary had no clue what the language on the edge even was. It looked like something out of a D&D game. Not English letters. It might not even mean anything.

The thing was she was sure she had left it behind in the storage locker. Not keeping stolen property on her for the first month was one of her cardinal rules. Longer if it turned up on a website or in a paper and had a specific name. This was a noticeable piece. True it had not been reported stolen, yet, but it had been on display and was fairly distinctive. She could not believe she had just picked it up from where she had left it and slipped it into her pocket.

Nice though. The back looked sort of like a tiny makeup mirror. The other side reminded her of pirate treasure, if it had been gold. Maybe that was what it was. Though the way it gleamed implied it was a lot newer than that. There was no date on it, at least not in any language she knew. She checked it over incase it had a hidden thumb drive or something in it, but found nothing. It seemed to be just a coin and she had checked it for tracking devices the night before.

Mary had no intention of driving all the way back through three towns to hide it in storage again. Not that day anyway. It was really unlikely that someone had snuck it into her pocket, so she must have grabbed it without thinking. Chastising herself she got her wallet and opened the change pouch zipper on the back. She never used it, preferring to keep her change in her pocket when she was not working. It would be safe there for a day or two.

Checking her reflection briefly she blew herself a kiss and slipped the coin into the little pouch.

The next thing that should have tipped her off about the coin was a few weeks later. She was on another job and had actually forgotten the coin in her pocket. First when she approached the house, the security system box suddenly turned off. Powered down. She was wondering why when from down the block another alarm went off… one she had not set up and called in to set off.

"Gift horses and all that…" she said and headed inside.

Then it happened again.

And again.

The third time she abandoned the theft and left then and there. It was too weird. Instead she went to an electronics store, the place she had bought her bug sweepers, and had them check her over for anything weird. Like an EMP or something that could cause electronics to short out. Nothing.

It happened again the next time and she got in and out with no problem aside from the eerie feeling she was being watched or something. The door had even been left unlocked. She kept it down to snatching just one necklace. No diversions this time. If someone was setting her up she did not want to get caught with too much on her. It was a daylight robbery so rather than head to her usual places to store it she went straight to a bank and opened up a safety deposit box.

Nobody came looking for her. Nobody had cops or big men waiting at her door to ask where the loot was. The official story on the thefts according to the reports included the words "police" and "baffled". They had noticed the houses where the security systems had failed, but had no idea how or why. Investigations were ongoing.

She hit another house. This time though she was so worried about what was going on when the power for the whole neighborhood went out as soon as she drove up that she missed the moped parked between the house and the garage. The owners were out. Their son was home from college. A fact she only learned when she was cleaning out the roll of cash hidden in one of the coffee cans in the kitchen and a nervous voice had called out, "Who is there?"

Mary had frozen, watching through her night vision glasses. He was right there and a flashlight beam had cut through the dark a foot away from where she stood when suddenly… his phone rang. The light moved away and he answered. "Hello? Yeah, the lights are out. Thought I heard something. I'm glad you called. It's creepy in here at night and we don't even have a landline any more." Walking back the way he had come…" make it quick my phone's about to die and I can't charge it right now…"

Heart pounding Mary breathed a heavy sigh of relief as quietly as she could and considered. It would be smart to leave.

She stayed. She cleaned out the whole house. Somehow she did not run into the boy once. The power turned back on almost the moment she got into her car. The theft made the papers and the TV news. They used the word "daring" and were trying to figure out how the thief had timed it to coincide with a freak problem at the power plant that had blacked out that one neighborhood. The only way to circumvent the smaller backup system. The people at the power plant were claiming to have nothing to do with it.

"This is getting out of hand," Mary told herself. It was tempting to keep going and see how long the luck lasted. Something was going on. Unfortunately she could not figure out what. She had brought the bug sweepers home. No sign of any surveillance. So how on Earth could somebody set this up?

She tried it again. In and out, no problem. Someone had actually left a window with no screen open. Pretty soon she was going to need a new storage container if this kept up, possibly just for the money.

The key to the whole business came to her one day when she forgot her wallet. Mary had been heading out for a simple grocery run, not thinking of anything in particular, and when she checked her purse she realized she had left it behind by her bed. On impulse she had reached for her pocket.

No wallet, but there was something. She dug inside and found the coin. The skull grinned at her, unmoving yet suddenly sickeningly organic. Too realistic.

Mary abandoned her groceries and went home. She found her wallet. The zipper still shut with no holes. So how had the coin gotten into her pocket? She had written off putting it there once, but she knew she had not taken the time to unzip her wallet for a coin she had forgotten about almost two months later.

"Why would someone break into my house, open my wallet, and slip a valuable coin into my pocket?" Nothing else was missing. A home fingerprinting with cocoa powder found no prints but hers on it. Worse she also dusted the coin. It had no fingerprints, even though she had been handling it. She even pressed her thumb into it and nada. "Okay…" Scratching it with her nail she did not feel any kind of wax or anything over the metal. Blowing on it she saw the cocoa just slide off. "Mm…"

Mary was not opposed to belief in the supernatural. Church wasn't all sin and blessings. One of the few things as a child her mother had splurged on was a picture Bible for children and it included a lot of the fun stories that even grown men often missed. The reason Daniel was thrown to the lions involved him blowing up a dragon. Jacob wrestling an angel and winning. Witches, gryphons, four horsemen, King Arthur and the Holy Grail… when you were as disinterested in the disposition of your eternal soul as Mary you tended to focus on the side stories rather than just Joshua and the family. And that wasn't even counting books and whatever movies were on TV or in theaters. She was a thief not a hermit and it was not like she had ever been in prison. Her mother had not been fanatical enough to think the _Harry Potter_ books summoned demons.

A genuine good luck charm? Stolen from some leprechaun's crock of…silver? She was not familiar enough with mythology to even guess where something like this would come from. If it was true.

Funny thing about long lasting fortunes. If you traced them back far enough you almost always found a crime. Some ancestor was a pirate or privateer or owned slaves or killed someone for their gold mine. Kings got kingdoms by killing everyone who said they were not the king. Ordinary people tended to blow their money. It was rogues and thieves who knew how to keep other people from taking all their money. It's why the best got hired by security firms.

It was likely that was how the Gilroy family made their fortune. If they were wizards or something Mary would probably be a frog or something. If they stole the coin from someone or something that might be why they did not want to draw attention by mentioning it was stolen again.

"Okay I need to stop imagining stuff or I'll be here all day," she said, rolling the coin between her fingers. The coin was… weird, but there was no proof that it was magic. She needed to calm down and consider her options. She carefully put it on a shelf, got her wallet, and headed back to the store. She still needed groceries.

When she went to pay and reached into her picket the coin was there. She did not even bring it out to look. She felt the cool metal under her fingers. Sunken eyes and cheek bones. Trying to appear calm she kept her face slack and paid for her food before driving home. When she got there she took it out and placed it on the table. "So it's a magic coin…"

Scientific experimentation is a lovely thing. At least until you get kicked out of the casino and told not to come back. These days they did not take your money and bury you in a shallow grave or break things in your body with hammers. What they did do was calculate the likelihood of your win and whether you knew it was going to happen. About a quarter of a million dollars in Mary was asked to cash out and leave and warned that her name was written in a black book shared by casinos. They had no idea how she was cheating, but it was made very clear she was not welcome. Otherwise the authorities would be called and they would figure out how she was cheating.

A few hundred grand was good PR, so they let her go. Any more and they would not be so nice. Mary got the point. She had proven what she came for anyway.

Roulette, slots, cards… she won them all. All the while expecting something to go wrong. Some price to be paid. Like good luck each time until number three… number nine… number fifteen. The only bad things that happened were getting booted out and how much they took out in taxes. Neither of which had to do with luck.

Was knowing that it was a good luck charm just a lucky guess?

Two hundred thousand dollars when she got home. Her mom could whine about her gambling all she wanted. Ha!

That bit of paperwork though put the brakes on things. It might be nice to win the lottery… right up until the IRS and a dozen federal agencies decided she had somehow cheated them on top of the casino. Maybe the skull on the coin was a warning not to push her luck. If there were not a downside she supposed the previous owner would be ruling the world or something.

Also they might notice her if she was too obvious. If it were her she might be watching for anyone in the area who suddenly had a rash of luck. How effective would the coin be against a physical assault from paid assassins? What wouldn't someone do to get back a magic coin? And she had stolen it after all, so it was possible to take the thing.

Careful planning. Whatever she did next would require thought.

To say that Mary's life improved after that would be an understatement. She had considered trusting the coin in more bets. Maybe at the horse track or something else. She was pretty sure she could walk through any security system. It was a gamble. She still had no idea how the coin worked. Was it a battery that would run out or would it work forever? And how well?

Instead she took a hundred grand from what she won at the casino and put it into the stock market. A one shot deal.

She made ten million dollars and change. More than good enough. There was some investigation. A man came around asking questions about insider trading. They found nothing and Mary happily traded her stocks in for money. Rich at last.

Lacy was against taking a few hundred grand herself, but Uncle Danny had no problem with it and they were able to retire at thirty-five. All was right with the world. Mary bought herself a mansion and began to surreptitiously empty her storage places, turning her home into a museum of its own.

Life was so good in fact that time passed quickly. One day bleeding into another. No worries. Like was perfect and as the days turned into weeks and the weeks into months, it seemed like it would go on forever.

It was one year to the day. Mary lay in bed on the very night when she had taken possession of the coin. She was watching a movie and just enjoying the feel of silk sheets on her skin. She was between relationships at the moment and just enjoying life. Things could not be better.

And then suddenly things could not be worse.

There was no sense of movement. It came over her like a dream. As if she fell asleep or had just women up and might be out again in a moment. It must have been some kind of dream because one moment she was in her bed and the next she was somewhere else entirely.

It looked like the set of a movie. Horror or maybe a gothic romance. The walls were made of skulls and bones. Not all of them human, just enough. The eye sockets glowed like orange fireflies. Not much by themselves, but noticeable and together enough to light the room like candles. In between them were longer bones from arms, legs and spines. She would have gotten a closer look, but she found she could not move, laid out on a wooden table like Frankenstein's monster waiting for the bolt of electricity that would bring it to life.

Cold shot along her skin like she had been dunked in ice water. She could not move. Her eyes were it. She felt awake now. If she was having a nightmare she should have woken up.

Something was making little skittering sounds. The lights in the skulls she saw were moving. With the sounds. At first it looked like they were just flickering but the way they moved… something was in there. Her ears picked up other sounds. Something bubbling. A fire crackling some distance away. The swish of fabric.

She tried to call out, but she could not make a sound. Her breath hissed through her nose, panting. She could not tell if she was strapped down, but she should have been able to scream behind her lips. Something. Was she drugged maybe? That would explain a lot. She had done drugs before, but the hallucinations had never been anything like this. Mary had only done those on a dare, not even recreationally and it had been years.

The fabric sound came closer. The slightest noise seemed to echo in the room. Looking up she realized she could not even make out how large the room was. The wall curved away and while it looked like all the skulls glowed, the higher ones were not bright enough to make out. The air was hit and she saw some sort of mist. Like after a long shower in the bathroom... or whatever was making the bubbling sound.

Suddenly a figure stood over her and it felt like she was in a dream again. Maybe this was what it felt like to dream and the memories would fade when she woke up, because what she saw made no sense. It did not belong in this macabre setting except possibly on Halloween. Not the middle of summer.

She was a princess. Beautiful beyond words. Looking at her made Mary feel… strange. Like she had taken a hit of nitrous at the dentist. The fear went away. All she could think was how amazing the woman was.

She was tall and inhumanly slender. She wore a frilly light blue princess dress the looked to be made out of lace. Tantalizing bits of her were visible through the fabric. Her skin was ivory white. No sign of veins or even pinkness. Like she had been carved from marble. Her hair was blood red and her eyes violet from end to end, except the pupils which were slit like a cat's. Only they reflected gold, not green or red.

Her hand reached out and caressed Mary's cheek, sending a wave of pleasure through her body. The skin was soft and cool. As she moved she revealed wings sticking out of the back of her dress, like a giant butterfly carved out of sapphires. No wait, despite the color and looking like they were carved from crystals they were feathered and folded, bird wings of some kind. Maybe large scales? Too ridiculously small to fly and so fake, like glass… until you looked inside and saw veins. Throbbing behind a clear yet leathery skin of each "feather". Then they flapped, just a bit. Mary felt the breeze. It smelled like flowers and… barbeque? No… meat. Cooking.

The woman… it had to be a woman even though there was something off. Too perfect. Too slim. Supermodels would kill to pull that look off. She should have looked emaciated. And her ears… they were too large, but thin and pointed. Almost like antennas on the side of her head stretching six inches through her waterfall of hair. There was also a small silver crown with sapphires embedded in it on her head. She slid her hand down Mary's cheek and down her neck. If she could move Mary would have writhed with pleasure. She caught a glimpse of the fingers… something was off about them. Only later would she remember they had an extra joint. The nails were like pearls.

_Shades of LOTR,_ she thought and mentally giggled.

As if she heard and appreciated Mary's joke the strange woman smiled and for the first time something marred her perfect _Fantasia_ appearance. Not that they were sharp. That almost would have been better. Fangs were sexy. These… weren't.

For a start her teeth were black. Not like they had gone bad. No, they were metallic. Mary had seen enough rich homes to recognize wrought iron. She clicked them together a couple of times and sparks flew past perfectly white lips. Mary saw that there were no incisors of canine teeth, just two rows of jagged tipped molars. Teeth for grinding.

A moment later she learned why.

The strange inhuman thing that she would later realized only superficially looked like a human woman… like the eye spots on a moth meant o scare off hungry predators… gently took Mary's limp hand in hers and lifted it. She gently lifted it to her lips and kissed it, looking into Mary's eyes. Mary wished she could smile. _So it is going to be one of _those_ dreams?_ She laced her long fingers with Mary's and with a playful grin brought them up to her mouth again, lips parting as she stuck Mary's middle finger in her mouth. Mary felt a warm tongue caress her finger and teeth clamp in it. It was very erotic.

Until the pain started.

The dreamlike sensation vanished again as fear and pain shot through her. Unable to scream out loud she did it in her head as eyes still locked on hers the stranger's jaw worked. Blood flowed past her lips down her chin and dropped warm and wet on Mary's body. The woman made a sound for the first time, a perfect bell-like voice moaned hungrily. No words. Just, "Mm…" Mary made similar noises when she got her first cup of coffee in the morning.

She let go with her lips and demurely turned her head. There was a spitting sound and Mary saw a bit of red meat fly from the woman's lips. Mixed in was the Passion Pink nail polish she had put in earlier in the day. Mary's eyes went to the tip of her finger, red and oozing blood. Exposed and obvious was bone, shimmering with the ruby glitter of fresh blood.

A tongue flashed out of her lips and the woman licked it like an ice cream cone. Her tongue was a mix of blue, like a lizard's, but streaked with purple where Mary's blood had stained it. The tip was forked and where it brushed the aching throbbing edge of bloody meet remaining around the exposed bone it felt rough, scraping more than licking. She could hear it scratch like sandpaper on the bone until all the blood was licked away, leaving it white. Her lips parted again.

Mary could feel nothing but the dull ache at the edge of her remaining finger joints. It hurt, but not as freshly as it had. She wished it did because it was almost worse as that mouth opened again and those black teeth clicked around her bone. The woman watched her face, the edges of her mouth curved up in a smile. Mary was not sure if she was even making faces, but she could see her own terrified eyes reflected in those gold pupils. She couldn't' bare to keep looking at her finger. That did not stop her from hearing the sounds.

Most people do not know this but fresh bone is remarkably soft compared to what it becomes when stripped of flesh and left to dry in the air. The outside if soaked in blood and the interior was marrow. Though that usually was not much in the smaller bones. Fingers for example. Bleached and dry bones compressed and became harder. So it lacked the sharp crack.

Moving back, the tip gone, the woman-ting's jaws worked casually, as if she were chewing on gum. Mary could hear the sounds of it being chewed. Inside she screamed again, waiting for her to go back for another bite. Picturing being devoured one tiny piece at a time.

Instead she reached to the side and hen her hand came into view it was, to Mary's shock, holding a dainty silver wand with a sapphire embedded in the star at the end. She waved it and stars seemed to fall behind it. The room dissolved around her and everything went black.

Mary sat up in bed as if she was on a spring and now she did scream. Long and loud, piercingly like a little girl. She screamed again and again until her throat was raw and her own ears hurt and she finally had to stop to inhale huge gulping breaths. Tears blinded her eyes and flowed down her cheeks.

Shaking she wiped her hand over her face and looked around. She was in her room. Alone. Not a thing out of place. The alarm clock even showed less than five minutes since she had last checked it and the TV show she had been watching had not progressed much. Mary decided she must have barely nodded off. She looked over at her left hand, expecting to see her finger restored; the nightmare over.

Instead she stared as ice worked its way through her veins and up her spine. Tremors moving through every part of her she raised it up and stared where the tip of her middle finger used to be. She held it up and examined it. The tip was not raw bloody or even injured. Skin had healed over it smooth and unscarred. But only two joints remained and there was no sign of the fingernail she had painted earlier in the day. Absently she flexed it, felt the smooth curve with her right hand, and tried to figure out the trick. Flipping it as if she would find a mirror or that she was somehow bending it out of sight.

But there was no trick. A piece of her was just gone.

**Left hand. Middle finger. Second joint. **

It might seem foolish, but aside from a vague unease and a bit of getting used to, Mary almost forgot about her loss. She had gone to a doctor the next day. She would have gone that night, rushing from the house in a panic, but common sense told her that outside an emergency room most doctors would have gone home and since she was not bleeding it was hardly an emergency. She may have been able to afford the best health care in the world with her current funds, but she was used to being poor and had a deep distrust of most doctors let alone the ER. Once the adrenalin ran down she brushed off the idea, deciding to wait for morning. Then despite everything she almost immediately fell asleep.

In the morning she went to the bathroom and when she looked in the mirror there were still flakes of dried blood on her breasts and belly. She brushed them off and after a brief shower skipped breakfast and headed straight to the doctor's office. Dr. Stevens had been her primary care physician for three years and had given her a checkup only two months earlier. To say he was surprised at the loss of part of her finger, not to mention the healing, was an understatement.

"You lost it over night?" He asked, unbelieving. "It looks like it's been healed for months."

"What, do you think I wouldn't have noticed it being gone before now?" She snapped. "Maybe when I was painting them I just assumed it rolled under the couch and forgot to pick it up?"

"No need to be snotty," he said. "I've gone over the MRI. Internally it's as if you've gone through a really top notch surgery, except you're healed and I see no evidence of scarring to the tendons or marks on the remaining bones and flesh. If I didn't know better I'd think you'd been born without that joint."

It was strange. It was scary. Ultimately though, what was she supposed to do about it?

A month later and aside from a few accidents when her fingers' reach exceeded its new length, she quickly dismissed the incident. Mary could not even bring herself to tell the doctor about the "dream". It was too ridiculous. A fairy princess? Complete with grown and magic wand? She was more incline to believe in some weird mind over matter explanation. Like when someone died in a dream and had a heart attack in real life. When her mother asked she aid she just had an accident with a car door.

By the next year it was a distant memory. Mary had a new girlfriend. Or mistress. Jane Jones lived two doors down and was a beautiful woman five years older than Mary. Her husband was some kind of businessman and often left his pregnant wife alone for weeks at a time. Mary always liked dating married women, especially when they were married to men. There was some emotional distance, plenty of excuses to keep it mostly just sex and the occasional date-night in, and it was often like seducing a virgin without any of the downsides.

It was another hot summer night. Exactly one year after the last one, though Mary had not thought about that. The two women were lying on the couch, falling asleep to a movie. Mary was absently rubbing Jane's swollen belly. She was a good four months away from delivery and while it was a little weird, Mary was really enjoying her lover's increased hormones and sex drive. In addition to her body going crazy her husband had practically refused to touch her since she had started showing. Like she was made of glass. Mary meanwhile had no such qualms.

Jane was snoring comfortably against her side and Mary was about to fall asleep too when the world vanished.

Mary would have been happier if the scene had been exactly the same. Like a prepared soundstage. Nightmares should not rearrange their furniture like people. Instead the table was positioned differently. Mary was near a fireplace, her body sweating from the added heat. The "bricks" were once again skulls and bones. Closer to the wall this time she could see something else holding them together, but did not know enough masonry to guess what. It looked disturbingly organic and for a moment she thought she saw it flex, just a little. Like it was breathing. She could see a large cauldron over the fire. Something green that smelled like stew bubbled inside it. Meanwhile in her own head Mary was already screaming.

_Not again. This can't happen again. _

Her denials did no good. The woman was just the same though her clothes were different. Not lace, but a diaphanous robe that floated around her like mist. Entirely see through though it blurred her slightly. Her body was beautiful, but not quite human. Too slim. Her breasts the wrong shape. Longer ribs. And a cow-like tail swished behind her along with her thick fluttering wings.

The attack was the same as before. Agonizingly drawn out and blatantly sexual. Up until the final move. Mary felt tears in her eyes as she watched the creature lift her hand, as gentle as a lover. Kissing it. Then bringing it to her lips and sinking in her teeth, stripping the flesh and cleaning the bone.

She tried to speak. Beg. Anything to stop it. She knew what to expect this time. It hurt, but she tried focusing on anger rather than fear. Not easy. She could not even piss herself.

_Why?_ She begged in her head. _Why are you doing this? Talk to me! Don't you realize what you're doing to me? Stop it! Stop it! STOP IT!_ There was the fear. No longer held back. If she heard Mary the woman ignored it. No more interested in conversation than a human was with an apple.

Again she stopped with the one finger bone. Then dismissed Mary with a smile and a wave of her wand.

Mary found herself on the couch again, though Jane was in a different position. She held back her screams this time. Shaking she held up her hand, looking at her finger. She wiggled the stump of the last joint, no longer to even bend it. The irrefutable proof of what was happening to her right there on the end of her hand. Completely healed, but still another piece of her missing. In the belly of a beast. She could still hear the sound of it being chewed and crushed.

Jane blinked and looked up at her. "There you are. I woke up and you were gone. Needed a bathroom break?" She saw tears falling from Mary's face. "What's wrong baby?"

The thing was Mary had no idea how to answer that.

**Left hand. Middle finger. Third and final joint. **

Mary sold the coin the following week. Then again the week after that to a different pawn broker because it reappeared in her pocket both times. It was no great leap to figure out the connection there. A magic coin with a skull on it and a house made out of bones? It was no great deductive leap.

It was just too bad that the coin was not cooperating. She sold it to three different pawnshops and each time by the time she got home it was in her pocket. She made fifteen hundred dollars… pure silver, creepy-cool design… though it was not antique as far as anyone could tell and none of the men recognized the writing on it.

Mary tried getting rid of it other ways. The coin would stay home, provided she intended to come back. If she thought about abandoning it the thing would appear in her pocket. So after a little experimenting she tried to sidestep the thing. She had stolen it so she could let someone else do the same. First she went to a bar she knew where a lot of disreputable people, setting it on the counter, while she got quietly drunk. Even leaving it behind when she went to the bathroom. When she came out she saw a guy in biker leathers slip it into his pocket.

Relieved she headed for her car and got in. As she sat down she felt something on the seat and reached back to get it. To her horror she pulled out the coin.

"What the hell is wrong with you? Why won't you leave me alone?" She threw it out the window and sped off. When she got home it was sitting on her living room table.

Later she put on a ratty collection of clothes, making herself look homeless and headed for a hobo camp. It was one of her plans incase she needed to run. Police checked airports and bus and train stations. They rarely checked hobo camps because such people could not really walk around high class neighborhoods undetected. Hopping a train car was a good way to get out of town too.

For now though she just found a place to sleep, pretending to be drunk off her ass again and left the coin next to her. It was stolen less than an hour in and she quietly wandered off. Five minutes later she felt it in her shoe and sagged in defeat not even bothering to look.

Eventually she just tried giving it away, picking a random teenager off the street. "Here, take this!" She pressed the coin into the boy's hand and backed up.

"Really? Neat!" He looked at it and put it in his pocket. Mary backed up a few steps and then checked her own pocket, pulling out the coin. The boy was surprised and checked his pocket, coming out with a few bits of loose change, but no large silver coin. "Cool! Am I on a TV show or something?" Mary just walked away. At a guess the coin, or whatever power was behind it, knew when it was being legitimately stolen versus when its owner was trying to lost it on purpose.

Next she swung by a garbage dump she knew. Few people were aware of this, but there were whole vats in such places where they connected precious metals. Gold and silver and platinum and everything else. It came from lost jewelry, old cell phones, computers, and all kinds of unlikely places. They even had places to melt them down. Mary slipped a guy a thousand dollars and told him flat out she wanted to melt down a cursed coin. He did not even argue and she threw it into the molted silver like it was the one ring.

The thing was fine when she got back to her car and saw it sitting on the dashboard, the skull on the front mocking her attempts. Later she tried just flattening it with a hammer and did not make a scratch. After that she gave up.

As July approached she booked a flight to Australia. If she could not ditch the coin, maybe she could ditch the woman. On the night she was expecting to be taken, she was on an airplane thirty-thousand feet in the air. Better yet, by the time her watch said it was midnight she had crossed the dateline over Europe and it was already the next day. If it was an annual thing then she was safe.

When the flight attendant came by and found the woman in seat 3-A was gone she thought nothing of it, assuming Mary had just gone to the bathroom. Some time later she heard a piercing scream and complaints from the other passenger as the woman was back in her seat staring at her hand, tears falling down her cheeks. A hang with only four fingers on it.

Worse when she got off the plane, Mary found that they had also lost one of her suitcases.

**Left hand. Ring finger. First joint. **

By the next year Mary was becoming increasingly desperate. It felt like being the princess in a popular video game franchise. The first time she was kidnapped it was a fluke. A scary weird thing that happened once. The bad guy was soundly defeated and she went home to a well guarded heavily fortified castle to sleep in comfort and safety. The monster that kidnapped her dead.

Only it never ended there. The monster always came back. It got into her flying castle, past her guards, dragged her across a dozen levels, and locked her away again. And again. And again. With nothing she could do about it.

Except in Mary's case nobody was coming to save her. At least in a cell she would be safe. Be able to see her attacker coming.

So she tried that. In July the next year she ran a red light and crashed into a police car. Then when she was in court she told the judge to "Fuck off!" when he fined her. Thirty days in jail for contempt of court.

When she left the cell she did so without humor and without the tip of her ring finger.

One would think by now she would be used to it, but the terror was just getting worse each time. Unable to move. Watching as the monster bit her finger off a piece at a time. More than that was wondering if she would always stop at one bone, or start taking more. Would it happen every year or stop? What happened when her hand was gone? Would it keep going to bigger bones, pieces of bigger bones, or even something more than extremities? She had lost one finger and part of a second already… it could be her hip or skull next… her teeth or ribs or ear bones… the possibilities were endless and terrifying.

**Left hand. Ring finger. Second joint.**

Before the next year she tried mailing the coin back to the original owner. Thomas Gilroy. She included an apology note and dropped it in the mail. It almost seemed to work too, but three days later she was again spirited from her bed and down another finger bone. The next day she found the coin in her shoe.

Exhausted and jumping at any sudden noise she decided to try giving it back in person. It might mean a prison term, but if it meant she could still count to eight and a half a year down the line, it would be worth it. Anyway she could try lying first.

It felt odd driving up to a mansion in the middle of the day in a car that could be traced back to her. She got out and walked up to the door, knocking on it and rocking back and forth on the wheel chair ramp attached to the stairs. A moment later a thirty-something year old man answered the door. "Thomas Gilroy?" She had never actually met the man. Only his wife. This guy seemed a little young to be him though.

"Ned Gilroy," he said. "Thomas was my father."

"Was?"

"He died recently. My father killed himself." He saw her face pale. "It was not unexpected. My father had a rare bone disease. It seems like every year he'd lose a piece of himself."

Gripping her hand, thumb moving over the bare space where her middle finger used to be and the stump of her ring finger, Mary said, "I know what that's like."

"I was just going through his things, deciding what to keep and what to sell."

"I didn't mean to interrupt."

"It's okay," Ned said. "I can use the break." He turned and led her inside. Men were always a little less than cautious around a pretty woman. "What was your name?"

"Mary Wayland." The house had too many security cameras to get away with lying about who she was. If things went sideways it would just look bad. "I worked here once a few years ago. As a cleaning lady."

He took her into a dining room. On the way she passed by a small table in the hallway. She saw the envelope she had sent him on it. Unopened, but with the shape of the coin clearly visible. As if he had rubbed his fingers over it to try and figure out the contents. "Tea? We only have mint…"

"No, thanks, I'm good."

"My father loved the stuff. I liked mixing it with hot chocolate powder." He pulled out a chair for her and after she sat he took a seat across from her. "So what brings you back? Did my father stiff you on a bill?"

"No, actually, I found something I believe may have belonged to him." She pulled the coin out of her purse and placed it on the table. "I found it in a pawn shop in LA while I was down there and recognized it from when I cleaned here. It's fairly distinctive."

He nodded. "I recognize it. He had that thing on display my whole life. Never let anyone else touch it."

"I'd like to return it if I can."

"Did it cost you a lot?"

She clenched her left hand. "I got it for very little money. The shop owner did not seem to think it was worth much. It was with a lot of other coins."

"Well I know dad had it since he was a boy," he said. "It was stolen a few years ago. Dad insisted we never report it though. I'm not sure why. I do know he seemed… happier since it was gone. Even his bone disease seemed to slow down. The last five years…" He nodded and Mary turned to see a picture on the wall behind her. "It was like he was a new man."

Mary's eyes narrowed as she saw a man in a wheelchair sitting with his family. His left arm and right leg were gone, replaced with prosthetics. "Did he have… the disease long?"

Ned nodded. "Most of his life. Ever since he was ten years old. There are twenty-six bones in the human hand, two in the arm, and three in the leg. He lost an entire arm and a leg, one bone a year. He had just lost the tip of his big toe on the other leg when it suddenly… stopped. Dad seemed so happy. Better than I'd ever known him. He was so focused on spoiling his grandkids… visiting with me, my sister and our brother and our families. His whole life it was always work, but suddenly… he was like a new man." He sighed. "We have no idea why he suddenly decided to die like that."

Mary did and felt a twinge of guilt as she looked at the coin on the table. "I'm sorry for your loss." She paused. "I don't suppose your father ever mentioned… anything about a woman."

"A woman?"

"A tall lady, very beautiful, slim with… um… black teeth."

Ned smiled. "Dad must have talked your ear off about it too. Or did you read his book?"

"Book?"

"Dad was a professor of mythology, specializing in sidhe."

"She?"

"Sorry, my dad was always very clear that you weren't supposed to call them…" He paused and reached into his pocket. She heard a jangle as he gripped keys. "Fairies. He said it insulted them." Fairies. Mary had tried so hard not to think of that word. "He was obsessed with them his whole life. I think maybe as a kid when he started getting sick he thought they were causing his disease. Or they could cure him. Then he grew up and just…" He shook his head. "Well anyway I appreciate you coming all the way down here just to return a coin."

"Your family didn't strike me as the type who usually frequent pawn shops."

"True enough. My dad was one of the luckiest men you ever met. He made a killing in the stock market when he was younger."

"I'll bet."

Ned said, "Look, that coin… it's just got a bunch of bad memories. My dad had all kinds of terrible stories. Scared the hell out of all of us. My brother or sister might want it, but I doubt it. Worst was his story about… the woman you just said. If you remember it all these years later, you can imagine how we felt as kids. The evil Tooth Fairy. Only he called her…" He paused. "Wait here a moment." Before she could object he scooted his chair back and headed for the nearest door. She waited a moment, looking down at the coin. He came back a few minutes later holding a red book with a velvet cover. He set it next to the coin and Mary looked at it. Three hundred dollar bills stuck out of the top. The title was in gold matching the gilt along the edge of the pages. THE BONE EATER. "Dad refused to call her the Tooth Fairy. I was seven before I learned about her from the kids at school. I hope three hundred covers the cost of the coin and the trip down here. The book is autographed too. We've got twelve copies and since you seemed interested in my father's story…"

"Thank you,' she said meekly. She hesitated and then reached out to slide the coin across to him. It was a crappy thing to do, but Mary wanted it gone. "Please, take it."

"I couldn't possibly. Like I said, too many bad memories," he said.

Mary wondered if he knew and was, like her, just refusing to say anything, or if it really had bad memories. Had his father told crazy stories about the woman who came to steal his bones every year for nearly sixty years? Her eyes were drawn to the book again. Did it have the answers? Doubtful, considering his continued condition, but what the hell.

With a sigh she scooped it up and said, "Thank you…" She got up and smiled. "You're too kind.  
Quickly she turned and hurried out of the house.

"Hey wait, you forgot—!" She head footsteps behind her and ignored them. Quickly she slammed the front door and hurried to her car.

As she drove away she cursed feeling the coin in her back pocket. Whatever. She drove away without looking back.

The book was small, but comprehensive. Mary must have read it a thousand times.

Page 1

_Introduction_

"Be he living or be he dead, I'll grind his bones to make my bread." _So proclaimed the fearsome giant who sought out the thief Jack. _

_The creature I have dubbed The Bone Eater has been recorded for centuries in many different cultures. Whether it is one immortal creature or a series of them is debatable, though they seem to be born in threes. The other two sisters being an eater of flesh and another who subsists on blood. It would be foolish to imagine it or they are the only ones of their kind. Invariably they appear at three ages, one being beautiful, one of middle age, and one as a twisted hag. The maiden, the mother, and the crone. _

_They may all be the same creature in different forms. Sadly all information on it or them is scattered and invariably originating from random people who know very little to begin with. Often scared or hearing it themselves from second of third hand information and oral traditions._

_Baba Yaga, harpies,_ _O-dokuro_, _ the sirens, furies, gorgons, Morrigan, Black Annis, Raw-head-and-bloody-bones, ghouls, the witches of Shakespeare, Sekmet, the sphinx, mermaids, the manticore, Wendigo, Hecate, Cerridwen, and a thousand others. Creatures who feed on the bones of men; that look like women, often mixed with animals, but are not human in any way. Too many to believe there is merely one beast. There is a lot of overlap between gods, demons, angels, and spirits. I prefer to think of her as a fairy. Creatures not quite immortal. Not quite indestructible. Though that may just be wishful thinking. _

_What it wants with a human's bones is up to debate. Many fairies from brownies to dragons have requested milk as a sacrifice. It may be a simple calcium deficiency. Trolls and fairies have been connected to teeth for centuries, often blamed for cavities. Not to mention the uses in voodoo-like spells. Other stories tell of witches, monsters, and sorcerers who need pieces of people to resemble them or retain their youth. The same for animals. The skin walkers of the American Southwest…_

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_Whether it is a personal code of honor, a fact of their very nature, the currency of immortals, or orders from some ruler or god they must obey fairies and other mythological creatures rarely outright lie and never break their word. King Solomon acquired the promises of several demons to spare or obey people carrying various symbols. Most either cannot or will not harm a human being unless said human breaks one of their rules. All the rules may never be known, but those suspected include: _

_Directly or indirectly insulting the being. Trespassing in a place claimed by them, injuring them, speaking unkind or untrue things about them, or using derogatory comments like "fairy" or excluding them from an important event._

_Insulting or harming someone or something under their protection. _

_Stealing from them. _

_Being descended from one of their victims. A curse can last through several generations. _

_Breaking a deal made with them or any oath made in their name._

_Accepting a gift from them without making a deal or offering something of equal value in exchange. _

_When a parent or someone else with authority over a person openly gives them to the fairies, intentionally or with a slip of the tongue. "I wish you were gone" or "I hope you get taken by goblins" and of course "if you do that again the bogeyman will get you" can be seen as an invitation to do so. _

_Admittedly some fairies will arrange situations to trick a human into either insulting them or otherwise harming themselves. Using illusion to invite them to sit by a fire that, in reality, is over the edge of a steep cliff or using lights to lure them off paths into dark forests and swamps._

_They also have the option of enforcing human laws and morals, which may differ from their own. Particularly major crimes such as murder, theft, or violation of oaths. Especially when they exchange gifts of their own for proper behavior. Most well known is the general agreement with Santa Claus/Krampus in which a present is provided in exchange for 365 straight days of "good" behavior. Seemingly childish, true, but millions of children particularly those who would be deemed "naughty" do go missing every year. Keeping in mind that the common image of the Christmas gift giver is more based on soda ads than actual myths and legends. The boogeyman-like Krampus is a far more likely description than the jolly bearded fat man. All fairy tales have their dark side. _

_I have personal experience of an unnamed source who claims that he stole his baby brother's first tooth, left for the Bone Eater under his pillow in a classic example of offering a sacrifice to a fairy for a gift. The next morning the brother still received one dollar in quarters, presumably a standard exchange from the fairy or more likely from his parents who assumed the tooth merely lost. Had the money itself been stolen from the brother likely nothing would have happened. _

_The thief woke up to find a silver coin under his pillow unlike anything he had seen before. Unable to explain where he got it the boy kept it secret, but soon learned that it bestowed on him great fortune in anything he tried. Far more than could be explained by mere good luck. Seemingly with no limit. _

_But there was a price. One the anniversary of the night he stole the tooth meant for the Bone Eater, he awoke in a strange place. A castle of skulls and bones. Where a cauldron boiled with oozing green slime in which bones floated. A beautiful woman on inhuman proportions stood over him and smiled. It felt like a dream. Until she bent down and bit off the tip of his finger._

_After that every year the same thing happened. He tried everything to break the curse. The coin itself turned out to be impossible to destroy or even dispose of, reappearing in his possession regardless of how he tried to get rid of it. And no matter where he went or hid the fairy found him and took her tithe. He even once tried removing a bone himself and leaving it with her, to spare some of the horror, but it was ignored in favor of a fresh one taken from his body. Possibly she prefers them fresh or there is a symbolism in taking it. Regardless she has never show the slightest sympathy for her debtor. _

_It is possible that several or even hundreds of fairies take on the general role of these holiday characters rather than merely one each. Be it Santa, the Easter bunny, the Bone Eater, the general monsters of Halloween, or the Christmas witch of Europe… So long as the human understands the covenant and agrees to it and benefits and then violates it, they are fair game. _

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_While a covenant with a fairy is nearly impossible to break, especially in these days of lawyers, someone who was merely cursed or "blessed" may be able to undo their connection to the creature in several ways. _

_The best would be to apologize and ask for forgiveness. However as one might imagine many of these creatures are uninterested in mere words and in the case of the Bone Eater get what they want from the person without their cooperation. It is true that in the past in exchange for a great prize or completion of some task a fairy has forgiven a debt or indiscretion, but more often the gift they give is magical and in the modern world little if anything could equal it. So the fairy gets to set the price which most mortals and even their descendants for generations to come could never pay. _

_Alternatively some go to another supernatural entity for aid. (See: 12 labors of Hercules or Jesus and Saul.) A stronger one can force the issue and make them leave their victim alone. One of equal power can try. And a lesser being might get lucky. Unfortunately aside from the trouble of trying to find and contact such a being, let alone convince them to take your side, the price of such aid is usually prohibitory. Often greater than the price extracted by the first being. One might convince a demon or god to save their body, only to lose their soul. _

_Second would be to kill or banish them. Difficult tasks as many of these creatures seem, either through their nature or magical abilities, impervious to things that would normally harm a human. If you even get the chance as they might be superhumanly strong and fast not to mention have centuries of experience in fighting. Meanwhile others have unexpected weaknesses. Iron, salt, garlic, wolf's bane, chalk circles, specific symbols, or in the case of the Bone Eater the smell of mint. Sadly in her case it is merely a mild repellant, rather than a deadly poison. It's possible the makers of toothpaste are aware of this, preventing her from stealing the teeth of children rather than accepting those given freely. Provided the children brush regularly. _

_The downside here is that attempts to kill them count as an insult and failure almost always means a _much_ harsher punishment. _

_Finally it is possible, if one is being punished for an unintended insult rather than a direct sleight against the being itself, to challenge the punishment. Immortals love games and challenges and will accept most, even allowing the challenger to dictate terms and rewards, while normally a person being challenged would get to list how, when, and where. The more of an edge the challenger gives themselves however, the bigger the prize the fairy may demand in exchange. Given than in a battle between a human and them they have centuries of experience, magical powers, and inhuman capabilities there are few if any challenges they cannot meet. And the more the human attempts to stack the deck, the worse the price when they almost inevitably lose. Likely far worse than whatever they wanted to escape from in the first place. _

It was obvious why Thomas never escaped his curse. It seemed that any attempt to break it was a risk and held a cost and could just make things infinitely worse. Throughout the book were stories of encounters with similar creatures. Trolls, fairies, goblins, witches, goddesses, dragons, demons, yokai… it hardly mattered what they were called or what their motives were. Really polite people made out pretty well, or at least escaped… usually. Rude people ended up screwed. Often with a lot of collateral damage. Fail to invite a fairy to a christening, the baby gets put to sleep for a hundred years and rapes and the kingdom gets destroyed.

At a guess the Tooth Fairy story was Thomas's real tale. Then here comes Mary, stealing the coin _without his aid_ and taking it on herself by again stealing from the Bone Eater. Ultimately taking the curse herself. There was a translation of weird symbols in another part that had been identified as ancient Celtic was on one page. _Take what's mine and you may gain, but I'll be back for what is owed._ It apparently rhymed in the old language. So basically you got the magically lucky coin, but you had to pay for it every year.

And once in you couldn't get out again. Like a time share or those old CD club deals.

It made sense. In a way it was even fair. In some countries they arrested thieves. In others they cut off their hands. Apparently in fairy land… well Mary got the idea. The Bone Eater even healed her up and stuck to the bones least needed. At one bone a year Mary would likely be long dead before her second limb was taken. With the coins powers anyone could live a long and even pleasant life. Gilroy had been rich with a large family. Mary could probably rob a house in a wheelchair.

It was no reward though. A trade, maybe. Ultimately though the easy life the coin provided would just accentuate the horror of the annual… cull? Harvest? Some might be able to deal with it, but Mary wondered if she could. Thomas had been estranged from his family, his story probably kept secret for fear of being locked up and strapped down, just like _she… or it…_ did to him every year.

Then Mary had tried to give it back. Fairy curses, the book said, often affected bloodlines. Would the coin have taken him back? If it had would it have been passed to his descendants? Apparently Thomas was unwilling to find out and found one more way to escape a curse. Though if the book was right death did not always work.

As if Mary did not know that already, this was clearly a creature you did not want to cross. One story told of an old woman who found a bone dropped by the Bone Eater and took it home to make soup. Either unable to maintain her human form without it and taking on her true shape or substituting various animal bones she came to retrieve it and the old woman told of a red eyed creature with the snout and tusks of a bore, the claws of a bear, the ears of a bat and the wings of a great bird showing up and demanding the bone back, which she eagerly gave it. Not that she was incapable of horrors even in her human form be it young and beautiful or old and hideous.

Breaking the deal would be nearly impossible. The only bad luck the coin allowed was in any attempt to get rid of it. She had definitely benefited from it. If she had been given the thing or found it things might have been different, but it was clear stealing it entitled her to no easy ways out. Mary was no fighter let alone a sorceress so attacking her seemed out. And even if she could go to church and promised god to serve him faithfully in exchange for her freedom, the book was right. Becoming a nun or something would probably be worse than the annual deboning and that was assuming He would be interested. Her own mother probably would not forgive her for half the things she had done that did not violate the Ten Commandments. Most of which she was not actually sorry for. She was more likely to get slapped with another curse just for asking on the whole _thou shall not steal_ thing alone and blinded on the adultery one.

Good deeds and a deal were out. She was a thief. The "Tooth Fairy", as far as she could tell, could probably walk into anyone's house. Heck, that's the power that let her do it. Not that she needed to if she could make silver coins appear and teleport people across the world. Money and possessions were not an issue and anything else could be hired. Heck there were probably whole groups of people available online that would worship her as a goddess and do anything she asked. More so if they knew she was a bone eating demon who lived in a castle of creepy glowing skulls.

The point being Mary likely had nothing she needed or wanted that was more interesting to either of them than her bones. Apparently she was delicious. If the Bone Eater (calling her any kind of fairy would be considered rude, at least in an adult so why chance it?) was going to get bored with her seemed unlikely especially since her old milking cow was now dead.

Absently running the coin through her remaining left hand fingers Mary considered it. Could she live her life like this? People with real congenital diseases did and without the benefit of supernatural luck.

**Left hand. Ring finger. Third and final joint.**

Mary tried apologizing and bribery first. Knowing she would be unable to move she penned a note and stuck it to her clothes with a brass safety pin.

_Please, _

_I had no idea I was stealing from you. I can give you money. I can buy you anything you want. If you need a task completed just ask. Take back the coin. I'll make love to you. Just please, stop taking my body parts. _

When she appeared on the fairy's table she was cognizant enough to see her take the note and read it carefully. Then she crumbled it up and smiled at Mary. As Mary watched she reached up and slid off the straps holding the blue silk dress she wore this time from her shoulders. Absently she brushed the crown from her head and they heard it fall to the skull paved floor with a clatter.

If the Bone Eater had seemed inhuman before, that was only because Mary had never seen all of her. If you did not get a good look and seriously did not believe in fairies she could have passed for human. Maybe a ballet dancer. Now though, it was obviously a completely different form of life. The rest of her body made the wings almost seem natural by comparison.

Her legs were double jointed like an animal's, the ankles essentially a backwards knee and it was clear she had been crouching on them the whole time. Using them as some sort of stool and hiding them under her clothes. Her toes looked human, but there were only four on her feet, each ending in a hook-like claw. Yet the part that touched down on the ground was human-like complete with its own ankle.

Her thighs were thick with large round buttocks. This was to match the stomach which was also round and swollen with three belly buttons in a triangle form. Her body was pear shaped tapering off as it rose and her well defined muscular torso and was smaller than the lower half. More human shaped but with extra ribs. Much thinner than she had thought because hanging down from her armpits was a second pair of arms. Bigger and more muscular with four clawed hands. The way they hung down under the dress had made her body look thicker and less snake-like.

She must have been a mammal. She had breasts, albeit they were small and pointy. Unlike humans clearly meant to be functional rather than decorative or playthings. Looking between her legs Mary noticed a thick cow-like tail. Other things seemed more or less mammalian too. Not exactly human, still far too big for that and she seemed to be in heat. A heavy musky smell filled the room.

It was strange. Inhuman. Disgusting. Erotic. It was easy to see how she could match both the descriptions of beautiful fairies as well as trolls and ogres. Standing up she must have been a good twelve feet high and as her secondary hands began loosening Mary's clothes she felt the power in them. The smaller hands were for delicate work. These could crush her entire skeleton into gravel. The extra parts made it clear also how a centaur might work, the way the human-like chest was so different than the rest, all those extra limbs. Too humanlike and beautiful yet so far removed from anything remotely descended from apes.

Maybe it was a mistake to offer herself sexually to this creature. On the other hand she seemed to be taking the deal.

Time passed. It was like nothing Mary had ever experienced. Some magic must have been involved in the way the Bone Eater manipulated her and sent electric chills through her skin and possibly her whole nervous system. Not that she needed that. Either she had a lot of experience making love to human women or just natural ability.

After what seemed like endless foreplay Mary found herself able to move. Part of her wanted to run. Escape. But where to? There was no door in the seemingly endless walls and it was obvious from the easy way the monster moved that it would be like a guinea pig trying to run from an angry antelope. There was furniture, a few book shelves and things she could not identify, only guess at. Not made for human anatomy, plus the fireplace with its bubbling cauldron.

Besides most of her was in no condition to try and escape. She was experiencing pleasures like she had never known. The fairy's lips were soft yet firm and her tongue was revealed to be almost a foot long, prehensile, blue and forked like a lizard's. And boy did she know how to use it. At the same time she guided Mary to pleasure her and responded more vehemently than even the most eager virgin or bored unappreciated housewife Mary had ever known with an underlying animal lust. Her scent was like potpourri of flowers and herbs. Even the tail came into play.

When the creature was done with her they lay curled together and it took her left hand lifting it to her lips and gave it a gentle kiss that despite exhaustion sent a thrill through Mary's entire body. Then she parted her lips, brought it up to them, and bit the remained her of ring finger right off.

Mary woke screaming in bed, just like always. She stared at the large gap in her fingers. Betrayal burned in her guts. Why?

Later after some thought she understood. It was as much a message as her note. Apologies were nothing. The Bone Eater had no need to deal. She had not made love to Mary. It had been showing dominance, like any animal. Mounting her. Letting her know that it could just take whatever she had to offer. And Mary had no doubt that as outraged and revolted as she felt now, in the same situation it would have her begging for more even as it took its next meal from her flesh. Not that it needed to. It could have easily forced her to do anything, screaming and crying the whole time. She had been like a doll in those hands.

Something did change after that night though. It may have been a show of ultimate dominance, but apparently the Bone Eater enjoyed it. Mary had been in bed with one of her human lovers a week later when the fairy had appeared naked in her bedroom. The woman running screaming from the room as she effortlessly took Mary in her arms. Later she would find herself spirited away to a large round bed far bigger than even her demon lover needed.

It became a regular thing and Mary had no say in it. Was never asked and found she could not, did not want to refuse, as she was taken again and again. Helpless to even feel helpless. At least when it was happening.

During the day she wondered, would it come that night? Could she fight this time? Escape? While knowing the answer was no.

Oh it left her bones in tact. No in between love making snacks. The fairy was even a gentle lover. When Mary cried… and there were times she could not help it, she would wipe them away and kiss her and hold her softly. Demanding in its desires yet consoling and knowledgeable. It was wrong and right. Painful yet pleasurable. Fulfilling and leaving her wanting each time.

And of course each year, the day came. Bone Eating day. She let Mary beg. Plead. Yet never responded to them with anything but a smile as each year she took another bone. Ignoring the screams and tears. No sign that she cared about what she was doing to Mary

In many ways it was better now. Mary liked the thing better when it showed up naked. She could more easily think of it as a monster. As something that could be beaten. When it wore clothes that was just a reminder that it was not just some animal. That there was a mind behind that beautiful inhuman visage. That a thinking being was doing this to her.

**Left hand. Pinky finger. Final joint. **

Nine years. Mary stared at the place where her last pinky bone had gone missing. It had been nearly a decade of hell. Brought to the depths of ecstasy and hope crushed again and again as she was shown that no matter how close she thought she could become to her tormentor, nothing would stop her from claiming her prize.

In addition Mary was slipping further from humanity. She had always had secrets. None of her friends or family knew what she really did for a living. Now though… what could she talk to anyone about? Her "girlfriend"? She barely answered her mother's calls and when she came down to visit hustled her out the door. What if she was there when the Bone Eater came for her? Lacy already was asking if Mary was on drugs or connected to the yakuza or something. She had noticed the missing fingers of course. What mother would not?

The lover who had been there the night the fairy had appeared would not even answer the door when she swung by to return her stuff. The police had not been called, but then, what would she tell them? Mary took the hint and stopped calling her. Likely there were women out there who would not mind a three way with a mythological creature, but very few who would like it as a surprise. And how did you put that in a personal ad? And unfortunately it was much, much better than being with a human woman.

The thing was, as she stared at her mangled hand and played with her remaining fingers, Mary knew she had to do something. The succubus-sex was great though it was a gamble how interested the fairy would be in her when her looks faded. There was even something to be said for the magic and the coin still worked. It was not like it was a huge fee for what she was getting. And there was no doubt that it could be much, much worse.

Mary could almost consider this her life.

The thing was her hand would not last forever. The pain of losing the bones was still there. This was no surgery. There would never be any anesthetic. A monster was coming to her every year and remorselessly biting a bone from her hand and eating it while she watched helplessly. With no sign of ever stopping.

She ran her right hand down her left arm. She hummed to herself. "The wrist bone's connected to the arm bone…" That was the thing. The deal breaker. One day… no, exactly twenty years down the line… the Bone Eater would finish with Mary's hand. She would have devoured every little bone. All the ones that could be done in a single bite.

She had seen Thomas Gilroy. An arm and a leg gone. No doubt long digested in the Bone Eater's massive swollen gut by now. Mary had curled her body against it. Heard it gurgled and pressed close could only guess at what strange alien organs worked away inside. Dissolving the ground up teeth of children and the bones of whatever other poor fools had dared cross her. Mary never even wondered what other lovers the fairy might have… at least not in a jealous way even as she placed kisses between those work and eerily pliant blue wings.

She doubted that no matter how many lovers the Bone Eater might have that she was even capable of truly loving a human being. No more than a woman who made love to an animal was capable of thinking of it as her husband. Some fairies might be, but Mary had abandoned the hope of touching whatever it had in place of a heart. She was not sure it was capable of such feelings among its own kind. To it she was less than a mistress or prostitute. Closer to a living sex toy. Convenient and pleasurable but with no say. No real relationship. Just something to be taken out of the drawer when the urge hit and used until the batteries died and then left to recharge for next time.

How did a mortal expect an immortal creature, one that had never even been human, to react? There were plenty of books and movies on the subject. Vampires, werewolves, gods, demons, aliens, and elves… a lot of mankind's first contact fantasies were remarkably inappropriate.

Given all that she had no doubt that when the Bone Eater finished with all the tiny bones in her hand, there would be no hesitation when she came for the bigger ones. The fairy's mouth was made for this and was not very big. Crushing, grinding teeth had torn through her flesh and bones a half dozen times now. The Bone Eater took her time on her meals. Sheering the flesh. Chewing the bone and separating it from the tendons and skin and meat. A single finger bone took several minutes before it was chewed and swallowed and Mary felt every bit of it.

She could never survive the same thing happening to her arm. A foot of bone stripped of every bit of meat. Mary did not know if she would be paralyzed again, like those people who reported alien abductions and experiments. Or if she would be screaming and fighting uselessly every step of the way. The fairy's skin was soft, but Mary had no doubt that she would be less than useless in a fight with the creature. Or that if she did indeed manage to cause some damage, that she would not pay for it as she fruitlessly tried to escape and was dragged down like a mouse to a cat and eaten anyway. "Bad human."

Thomas Gilroy had gone through it four times. An arm, a leg, and then preparing for number three as a sixth toe was being eaten. Had he been her lover too? Or had he never offered? The Bone Eater had an otherworldly allure but it was easy to imagine that many… maybe most people would see only the horror. The inhuman man eating monster. The fact that Mary even enjoyed the sex was probably some kind of perversion. A lot of people probably would have killed themselves by bone three.

Mary knew she had to stop this and she knew that she could not wait another year. Rubbing her two remaining fingers together she made her decision. If she was going to cut it off she needed to do it before she lost another finger. And if she failed to do so, she was going to be put through _real_ torture. She had done a lot of research on fairies and how understood why people had often believed Fairyland was located on the border of Hell itself.

Thankfully she had a year to think about how to do it.

Slightly less encouraging was the memory of making love under the glowing eyed gaze of an army of skulls. Given the Bone Eater's modus operandi either she came to claim them after death (unlikely considering what was done to bodies these days) or they were the skulls of other people who had challenged her over the years. Why else would she have not eaten them? They were trophies. And she had enough to wallpaper her house with them.

None of them managed to kill her and she had never seen any sign that there were any gaps where and escapee might have gone. There were stories of people outwitting fairies, but far more of them dying or being eternally cursed. Even more of them just disappearing, never to be heard from again. Thomas Gilroy had been a professor and spent his life studying the things and had never felt that the attempt was worth it. He had literally chosen to be eaten rather than risk the consequences of failure and in the end his only way out when he thought it might start again had been death.

Deep down some scared part of Mary remembered the feel of those iron teeth as she wiggled fingers that were no longer there and wondered if he might not be right.

**Year ten. Nine bones down. One hundred ninety-seven to go. **

If Mary doubted the true nature of the monster to which she was enslaved those doubts were erased when she appeared in its lair the next time. She had slathered herself in mint scented body lotion. She had been drinking mint tea for weeks. She had even spent time just before bed making sure to brush and rinse her mouth out with mint toothpaste and mouthwash and ate six candy canes and some Thin Mint cookies before bed. All in all she smelled like a Christmas display.

The Bone Eater reared back as soon as Mary appeared, hands clasped over her mouth and eyes glaring. Mary would have laughed if she could. She wondered if it actually hurt the beast or if it was just a disliked scent. Sadly there was no way to apply the flavor to her bones, so in all likelihood it would not put the Bone Eater off her lunch. All she had to do was strip off the covering to get at those tasty calcium treats. Mary could not read all her inhuman emotions, but the sneer that revealed her iron teeth translated easily enough. This act of defiance meant that she was going to take her time.

Pinned to her chest was another note. This one in an envelope marked "Official Challenge". After a moment the Bone Eater edged forward and snatched it of, not even bothering to try unhooking it from her pajamas, tearing through silk that had cost a pretty penny. In what might be her last year alive, Mary had not exactly been frugal.

Mary watched her eyes as the Bone Eater read the note. She could hear it in her head after having gone over it and over it to make sure it would work like she hoped. She wanted to be defiant, yet not too insulting. For pretty much the same reason you did not spit on the guars or the warden on your way into prison and chickens did not generally attack the farmer who came for their eggs. Too bad it seemed to have failed in that regard.

_I hereby issue challenge you for my freedom. _

_While I understand there are aspects of our relationship I may not ever be capable of understanding, I can no longer continue being your meal. It's not me. It's you. _

_So I challenge you. I am not much good at anything but stealing and thanks to you my picketing skills have suffered, so we'll have to stick to breaking and entering. The ordeal: to steal an item from a person I will designate without being caught or found out by that person. If I succeed, I go free. If you succeed, name your reward. If we both succeed I pick a new target and we continue until one of us fails. You go first. That means if the item you steal is discovered missing before I have my turn that means it will only be harder for me when the target it on high alert. _

_Sincerely, Mary_

The Bone Eater read through the letter carefully and then eyed Mary. Then to the woman's shock she heard the fairy's voice for the first time. It was musical, hypnotic, and if she sang Mary was sure she would cause many a sailor to swerve their ship onto rocks to hear more. Even dripping with distain and contempt it stirred things inside her that almost made her lie down and beg to be eaten.

"I take it you wish to use the coin?"

Finding herself free to move Mary knew she had to be careful here. Her plan did not require it, but appearing too confident would likely tip her off. "If you don't mind. You've got magic powers. Of course you can take it back, but wouldn't that mean I was free anyway?"

Moving fast as shadow the Bone Eater loomed over her nude and imposing. She bent and cupped Mary's face with one of her smaller hands. Smoke rose up from where it touched the mint lotion as if she were being burned by acid. "I will take so much more from you when I win." She smiled, or at least bared her teeth. "I am going to make you immortal. Like me. I'll send you out to collect teeth and bones for me. I'll feed you my leftovers. Then I will devour your bones and make love to you in ways that will break you, but you will never die and always regenerate. I'll devour your skull, your spine, and your ribs while you watch and like Prometheus you will get to feel them re-grow for me to do it again.

"If you back off now I may be forgiving, my pet. We will never mention it again and go back to the original arrangement, but defy me and I will make you suffer for an eternity."

Mary had heard worse ultimatums from women she had broken up with, but rarely from any she seriously believed could pull them off. She was scared, there was no denying it. The casual way the fairy had stolen her bones and ignored her pain had driven the point home just how powerless she was. How much pain she could be made to feel. And how much she could probably dish out.

But it was that same voice that spurred her on. Ten years. Many of them as her lover. And Mary had not been worth a single word. Take me. Eat me. Fuck me. This creature had snatched her away and stolen any hope of freedom. No parole. No call from the governor. And the certain knowledge that she had done this before. All over one tooth decades before Mary had even been born.

Human laws were not much fairer, she knew. There were countries where even the smallest theft could be punished in ways best described as "crimes against humanity". But Mary had never much cared for human laws either. She refused to pay for her own crimes, let alone someone else's.

"Fuck off Tinkerbelle, you goddamn little _fairy_," she said. The Bone Eater took a step back in sheer shock, as if she had been slapped. "You say you'll make me like you? You could have done that this whole time? Then you should have. I could have loved you. Relationships are full of pain. Instead you treat me like you said, as your pet. Well screw that. Humanity rules this planet, not your lot and whether I earn my freedom or spend eternity as your little prison bitch, we'll both know I defied you. And maybe next time someone else will beat you or the time after that. Because the important thing is to stand up to monsters." She stood up on the table to meet her eyes. "You may be real, but I don't believe in fairies."

Sadly the Bone Eater failed to drop dead. Her eyes narrowed with the promise of pain to come. "Very well. Know that I have not lost a challenge such as this in more than five thousand years and it was to someone much stronger and smarter than any mere human." The way she said it showed how little she thought of humanity in general. Mary could not blame her. People in general sucked.

"Very well, you just have to steal a toy. Any toy will do."

The fairy smiled. It was a little too confident for Mary's tastes. "From who?"

Now it was Mary's turn to smile. "Santa Claus."

It was a leap. Just because one fairy existed did not mean another was real. Still if you were comparing the Tooth Fairy to old Saint Nick, it was a reasonable bet. And if he did not exist then the challenge would be null and void and she would pick someone else. Jupiter. Satan. The archangel Michael. So long as they existed her plan would hopefully work, eventually if not immediately.

The Bone Eater was not happy with the choice, but said nothing along the lines of 'There's no such thing." Instead she said, "You are aware that the being known as Santa is not the jolly elf seen on television? To catch his ire is not something I would wish on anyone."

"Do you forfeit?"

She stood tall and confident. "Never. But be warned, any discomfort I feel will be taken out of your hide."

Mary nodded. "I am well aware." She had faced punishment before. It had not stopped her from stealing anything. Ever. "Should we have a time limit? Say a week?"

This time she flinched. Haughtily she said, "You are human. I can give you a month."

"Fine a month for you to bring me the toy you stole and them a month for me to succeed at my own theft."

"You are sure you do not wish to go first? Santa's home is not easy to find let alone enter. If he or the elves who serve him notice I took something it will be even more so. You could even choose another target."

Mary nodded. "I'm sure. If it was going to be easy it wouldn't be much of a challenge, would it?" She gestured for the Bone Eater to come closer. "One last thing though."

Leaning in she said, "What?"

Mary grabbed her head and pulled her into one last kiss. She was surprised but the fairy kissed back, her lips sizzling at the touch of mint. Mary broke it off and looked in her eyes. "It wasn't all bad, babe. Maybe it's not such a big deal among whatever you really are, but for me being eaten a piece at a time is out."

She reached up and ran a finger along Mary's jaw. One of the clawed ones. It felt like a razorblade even if it did not quite break the skin. "Look around _babe_. Nobody gets out of here. You least of all."

Mary nodded. "Then make like Kris Cringle and _bring it_."

Mary never expected to win. She was not the type to believe in fairy tales and last minute rescues. Good did not triumph over evil and even if it did, she hardly qualified. She was a thief and a liar and worse. She had grown up and gotten a fairy godmother. Look how that turned out.

So when three weeks later Mary was sitting in her recliner binging a TV series she was not surprised when it was suddenly blocked by the Bone Eater in her princess gown. She looked beautiful and triumphant as she swept forward and placed a wooden train down on a coffee table. Old fashioned and painted red with a black roof and wheels. Nothing special.

Still Mary eyed it and felt an urge to run her hands over it. A toy from Santa. What kid did not dream of such a thing? Anyone would give up every other present they ever had if they knew, knew for certain, that something like this under their tree or in their stocking really came from Santa.

She drew back her hands. She doubted anything she has ever owned came from him. And if it had, she was a naughty girl. They weren't for her.

"You got it." She did not say "Is it real?" Or "Can you prove it was really Santa's?" The whole challenge relied on the fairy's honor. Questioning it would be stupid and just pile another pointless insult on the heap.

"It was not an easy task you set, my pet. The workshop has long been sought by many, human and fairy alike and it has many protections both magical and mundane…"

Considering she had not spoken a work to Mary in ten years the Bone Eater had no problem giving a play by play description of how she entered Santa's keep and snatched one of his toys. It was mildly annoying but informative. Judging by the description Santa was a serious badass. Also she was not outright saying it, but the Bone Eater was terrified of his wife.

When she finished her tale, which admittedly was full of clues that would have seriously helped Mary burgle the place she bowed and said, "Next it is your turn to claim your prize my dear, if you dare."

"I dare not," Mary said and stood up. She held out her hands like she was going to be handcuffed. "Take me away."

Genuinely startled the Bone Eater stared. "You give up? Knowing the fate that awaits you?"

Mary shrugged. "As they used to say, it's a fair cop, gov. You win. I obviously can't beat you. I'm all yours."

The fairy smiled. "Ah. You hoped I would forfeit. Or fail in the task, falling to Santa's minions."

Mary shrugged. "Well you're amazing. I knew there was no chance I could beat you myself."

Placing a hand on her shoulder and scooping up her toy trophy the fairy said, "Flattery will not lessen your punishment mortal." With that Mary and her captor vanished from the mortal world.

Mary's punishment was indeed monstrous and terrible. First came the transformation. She watched frozen in place as the Bone Eater place the stolen toy on a shelf and then set about making a potion. She had things hidden all about the cavern of bones usually inside some of the skulls Mary saw things scuttling about inside but never got a good look, being unable to look away from the pot and only seeing things at the edge of her vision.

It was like watching a cooking show in a way. Though far too many of the ingredients thrown in the pot looked like human organs not to mention various animal parts. In the end she drew a knife and sliced off one of her own hands, letting it fall into the pot with a hiss between her teeth. Mary watched her stir the bubbling cauldron with another hand while the one missing grew back.

Apparently it was more than mere immortality that made this fairy have so little empathy for human pain. If Mary had grown up where a limb grew back in an hour she might be more into S&M games too. Though she doubted learning to tolerate that level of pain was going to be either pleasant or something she had any choice in.

When the potion was done the fairly ladled it into a glass and it turned from green to blood red then to purple with green sparks. She turned and walked over to Mary, lifting her chin, opening her mouth, and pouring the searing serum down her throat. It was like swallowing lava.

In her head Mary screamed and then went totally blank as the potion began to take effect. Things slithered inside under her skin. Bones reshaped. She saw her teeth fall out of her mouth and felt them replaced by something else that tasted of metal and felt heavy in her jaws. Her bones ached like growing pains multiplied by thousands. Every cell in her body changed and new limbs burst from her back as her bones rearranged to make room for them.

The pain of it was unimaginable and there was nothing she could do.

When she came back to herself her whole body felt like ice. She tried to move and her arm shot out. Unused to controlling whatever had been done to her. She rasped out, "Mirror. Give me a mirror."

"Check your pocket."

Mary had been wearing another set of silk PJs when she arrived. They were shredded, but the pocket did hand from her chest in tatters. She reached inside and was only mildly surprised to find her coin. Hand shaking, she carefully held it out and looked into the blank side, getting a good look at herself.

Having started out human she was quite different than the bone Eater had been, though there were similarities. Re wings, large like a human sized hawk, flexed on her back. She was thinner, taller, with more ribs. A look over her shoulders showed more ribs and her shoulder blades looked different, changed to allow for the crystalline wings. Her ears were pointed and her eyes were solid red from end to end, as if someone had shoved eye-shaped rubies into her eye sockets. She could see things she could not even begin to describe or guess at and smell others.

Her fingers and tied still came in five each… the missing ones having grown back. She was feeling a lot better than she should. The enhanced healing probably. She was a lot slimmer though and they were all longer than they had been. Her face was thinner too and her hair stuck up like dandelion fluff only in red and her skin was peal pink. No tail. Her ears were pointed, but more like a TV elf's than the antennae of the Bone Eater. Her teeth were all black molars just like hers though. It made her wonder if the fairy had been something so strange that her current form was as close to humans as Mary's new one was to what she had originally been.

The Bone Eater held out a small bowl. Inside were half a dozen teeth. Mary's pointed nose twitched and her mouth watered. They smelled delicious and her stomach growled. "Eat up. You'll need your strength."

**Six months and more than 180 bones later. **

Mary found pain lessened in her fairy form but hardly nonexistent. Having a rib eaten out of her chest by her "mistress" hurt just like she thought it would. Only she had hope this time so she bore it out. Nearly every bone in her body had been eaten straight from her flesh and her treacherous apparently indestructible flesh re-knit itself and grew new ones for the next time.

In between Mary found that fairies experienced a lot of joy from sex too. More than a human could bare. Her endurance meant she could continue for days without stop. Stories of fairies making love or dancing with humans until they died were more believable and made more sense. Though the chance to test her limits was, well, limited.

Much of the time she was either given lessons in fairy lore and law, so as not to embarrass her new lord and master. Also she was taught magic. Divination. How to fly. Everything she would need to go out and gather the teeth left by children without being seen or caught and to gather the lost human currency needed to pay for them. Fairies had many reasons for the things they did and they made sense, even going so far as to help the natural world in ways humans could never understand.

All the same it did not escape Mary that she was a slave. And a poorly treated one. She had known enough women beaten by their lovers to know where she stood, even if the bruises healed. At best she was a drone, meant to gather food for her queen and satisfy her sexual desires. Easily replaced and incapable of denying her. Meanwhile the Bone Eater, now that she had a servant, obviously intended to sit back and let Mary do all the real work.

Not a bad plan and one day one Mary might implement herself, if she were free. Sadly while the Bone Eater allowed Mary her own princess dress as a sort of uniform, she got little else but a corner to sleep in and a few teeth and leftovers from meals she cooked to feel the Bone Eater to take the edge off her hunger. It was like being a kid again. And as a fairy she could not even steal things to make herself comfortable. She would owe the owners and until and unless she was free of her mistress, she could not pay. At best she could sip milk left out for stray cats, since nobody left it out for fairies these days. It tasted like wine to her new tongue. Everything she was belonged to her cruel mistress and she had no recourse.

That was until one night in early December.

Mary was huddled in her spot, eyeing the skulls. One near her was that of a small horse rather than a human. If you looked there were many animal bones and not all of the skulls that looked human were. It had taken her a while to notice that this particular skull had what looked like a broken horn, curled like an ivory candy cane bitten off to a stump, sticking out of the forehead.

The Bone Eater had finished casting her divination spells. She came forward with a scroll listing Mary's clients for the night. (Many sidhe did not do well in sunlight and Mary found she was among them. She did not quite burst into flames, but her skin would blister in moments like a radiation burn and she had no desire to see what long term exposure did. Thankfully list her mistress things like iron, salt, and other household things often used for fairy replant did not seem to bother her.) Mary unrolled it and scanned the list.

"Tommy Willis again?"

"I swear I love junior league hockey," the Bone Eater said. By now Mary really wished she had a better name for her. Unfortunately knowing a fairy's true name could give one power over them so it was an extreme insult to even ask. Or give them one without their permission.

Mary rolled up the scroll and was preparing to leave when they both heard a thump from high above. The Bone Eater looked up. "Who dares?"

Suddenly soot fell from the fire into her pot. Mary smiled. "Damn, it's about time."

Looking at her and realizing something was wrong her mistress snapped, "What did you do?" Her wings fluttered irritably and she bared her claws.

Her turned and smiled up at her defiantly. "It's not what I did, it's what you did."

"What?"

They both heard something coming down the chimney. Not much soot fell. Mary had been forced to clean it several times already. She just smirked defiantly. "You should have let me go. You forgot what I originally was."

"A human," she spat.

"A thief. And you know it's not like the old days. If you're a good thief you don't go to prison when you're caught. Well not for long. They don't hang you in most places. You get hired." She held up the scroll and waved it. "High level security jobs. Retrievals. Or the cops use you themselves as confidential informants. Bait and stoolies to catch major criminals." She let her iron teeth show. The Bone Eater was reflected in each one. "Now who could be coming down the chimney?"

Her eyes widened and her head snapped around to stare at her hearth. "No! Impossible. You can't betray me and I protected myself. No spells. No divination. I left no evidence. He couldn't possibly know it was me!"

"Unless, and this is just a theory mind you, I ratted you out before I was your slave." Mary smiled beyond human norms as the realization sank in. "Wasn't sure how to reach him. I mailed a letter, burned another one, and swung by Santa's Village during the summer to talk to the guy in the red suit. There's even a bunch of websites who claim to deliver. I guess one of them worked. It was summer so I thought he'd get here earlier, but I guess he's pretty popular so it took a while."

Laughter drifted down from the chimney, rough and growling. Part animal, part human… or something like neither. "Ho-ho-ho…" Ignoring the building smoke from the fire and the head a large black hand, furry with jagged claws, reached down and gripped the edge of the fireplace.

"No…no… no…" The Bone Eater whimpered. She pointed at Mary. "It was her idea!"

"But I didn't actually steal from him," Mary said. "You did. I refused to even try, remember? And if he got my letter he was watching me, not you. You never cast any protections spells on me, your little _pet_."

"You tricked me!"

"Duh! Thanks to you I know sidhe law. We both know who is to blame. And who's been naughty. I got the idea from when I was a kid and adults would try to play 'the quiet game'. It doesn't take long to realize the way for the kids to win is to immediately and intentionally lose."

Something blocked out the fire. Even with her fairy eyes and the glow of the skulls it was impossible to make out the shadowy figure that slithered out of the fireplace. Black as night it was huge, larger than should have fit. Bigger than the Bone Eater. Horned. Mary caught a glimpse of glowing pitiless eyes and claws and fangs. The bone eater scream, her beautiful voice echoing like crystal and making the skulls vibrate, as if their souls were laughing at her plight.

Mary rushed to the pile of ragged silk she used as a pillow that had once been her pajamas. There was something hidden among them, that had been strapped to her leg and carefully hidden.

"Help me!" The Bone Eater screamed. It was not in a human language, but one of the gifts of the fairies was to speak any language. Mary turned and saw her being dragged toward the chimney.

"I have a gift for you." Turning she walked over to where the creature's claws shot up sparks as the scrabbled over ancient skulls like cobble stones, trying to escape the thing resolutely dragging her into her own fireplace. She hefted the small crowbar and looked down into her eyes. "Merry Christmas."

She lashed out, slamming the small metal bat across the Bone Eater's face, shooting out more sparks are she loosened a few of those black teeth with a bell-like clang. They spilled across the floor and her hands clasped over her mouth, her eyes showing pain and shock.

Then she was just gone. Nothing left but a roaring fire and Mary. She took a deep breath, free at last. Then she looked down at the scroll still held in her hand. "Mm, well it's not like I have anything else to do tonight. Waste not; want not." She saw a familiar tiara lying on the ground and picked it up along with the bloody iron teeth. Placing it jauntily on her head she walked over to a shelf and put the teeth into the wooden train left there. "The Bone Eater is dead. Long live the new Tooth Fairy."

On Christmas Lacy was shocked to get a call from her daughter. She answered quickly. "Mary?"

"Hey mom."

"Young lady, where the hell have you been?"

"I wont' lie to you mom, I got busted for stealing something. I've been… well let's just say the place I was locked up made a French prison look like the soft option."

"Well… are you alright?" It was clear she wanted to say something about Mary deserving it, but parental concern won out.

"I'm fine. I can't say it was easy but I got through it."

"Humph. Then I hope you'll be back soon. Do you have a place to stay?"

"Actually I do. It's a little… bare bones, but it's mine."

"Can I expect to see you this Sunday?"

"Uh, probably not. I'm not even in the country. I got a new job."

"Doing what?" Her mother asked suspiciously.

"Retrieval work. Totally legit. I even handle money. I pick up the goods, leave the cash, and bring it back to… ha… headquarters. It's a big business. International. And I promise you that I don't go anywhere I'm not wanted."

"Mary…"

"Mom, I promise. I can't get into the details of our clients and what we do, but it is good work, helps out kids, and it's something I can really believe in. I may even be recruiting soon. We've got a big place here and I think there's room for at least one opening since the CEO was recently retired."

"Good benefits?"

"Puts food on the table. Can't beat the health plan. They assure me I'll practically live forever and my teeth are practically indestructible. I even got new fingers. The old boss is now somewhere up north doing charity work at someplace that's involved with toys." Santa did not employ elves so much as he ran the equivalent of fairy prison making them dig in his coal mine. If the Bone Eater was very, very luck that was the worst he would do to her. Fairies were usually a lot more lenient to each to her than they were to humans. "Really mom it's great and I'll try to see you as soon as I get a handle on things here." Like using fairy glamour to appear human.

"Seeing anyone special?"

"I actually just got out of a relationship with someone I met while I was on lockdown. She was a real monster. Great in bed, but not exactly right for me. Remember that guy who used to live next to us and beat his wife? Like that but worse."

"I hope you aren't taking her back."

"Not likely. I doubt she's getting out any time soon. Me, I plan to walk the straight and narrow for a while." Absently she waved her wand and smiled as a tight red dress made out of real rubies appeared on her elfin body. "I sent you a present in the mail. It is sort of a good luck charm of mine. I don't need it any more so I hope you get some use out of it."

"Really?"

"Good luck mom. Merry Christmas and remember to leave out some cookies for Santa. Believe me; you do _not_ want to be on his bad side."

"Happy holidays, baby." The phone clicked off and she hung up. At almost that exact moment there was a knick at the door. Lacy stood up and walked over to find a delivery man waiting. He handed her a small box. She signed and when he left she went to the couch to unwrap it. Inside was a strange silver coin.

**The End**

**Little Girl, Big Knife**

**By, Clayton Overstreet**

Nobody ever said that when the end of the world came anyone would know about it. Who exactly did they think would tell them? Was there going to be a starter's pistol? A public service announcement? In the event of an actual emergency it was a fifty-fifty shot someone would turn on the Emergency Broadcast Signal.

At the time Kate was unaware that anything was wrong. There was a banging on her bedroom door and she opened her eyes a crack. It was still night out. From outside her door she heard her brother's voice. "Kate. Let me in. Open the door and let me in."

"She yawned and closed her eyes. "Back off Justin."

"Let me in!" He was practically roaring.

Drifting off to sleep she ignored him and after a couple more minutes the banging stopped. Smirking she drifted back to sleep for a few more hours.

When she woke up on her own with her alarm blaring in her ear she was mildly surprised. It was still dark. Normally her mother had to come in and wake her up, especially in the middle of the week. It was Wednesday, right? Yeah, she remembered because on Friday her class was supposed to go on a fieldtrip to an apple juice factory. Not the most exciting day maybe, but it beat math class.

Her alarm clack she swatted and then frowned at. The digital numbers said it was eight o'clock. She looked out the window again. No lights except the yellow glow of a streetlight a half block away. She got up and walked to the window. "Whoa…"

The world looked mostly the same. Except for a few small things. One, in the distance she could see some building was on fire. There was a lot of smoke and she could see flickers on the room. The firemen would have their work cut out for them. Whatever had caused it probably knocked out the power for a while, messing up her clock. So what,w as it midnight? Two? It sure looked like it.

Not a lot of cars on the street, but it was night and in the suburbs, so no surprise there. But as her eyes went up to glance at the sky there was something weird. First she noticed a cloud. Not a big one, but dark as far as she could tell in the moonlight. It must have been an effect of the smoke or something, but she thought she saw something move inside it. Not flying, more slithering. Like a worm in an apple. She was trying to get a better look when she saw the moon.

It was purple.

Oh it still had the same marks. The same face stared down at her. Only the color had changed. Another smoke effect? Some weird phenomenon? Kate was only ten so she had no idea. Was this what her big brother had tried waking her up to see? Maybe she should not have ignored him.

Feeling the need to pee she went to the bedroom door and peeked out. No sign of anyone so she skittered to the bathroom. She slammed and locked the door, did her business, and then slipped out of her nightshirt to take a shower. She did not feel tired and thought _What the heck? I'll get cleaned up and then watched early morning TV until everyone else is up. _Almost as soon as the toilet stopped flushing though she heard a pounding on the door, just like before.

"Kate! Kate, let me in!"

"I'm taking a shower Justin! Stop being a jerk!"

"LET! ME! IN!"

"Not by the hair on my chinny-chin-chin! Use the one downstairs." What was his problem? If he kept yelling like that he would wake up mom and dad and they would be pissed.

She scrubbed up, washing her hair and making sure to take her time just to annoy Justin when he came back a minute later and rattled the door again. She began singing and soon he went away again. Next she got out, dried, and peeked out into the hall. Clear again. Smirking she hurried to her room and slammed the door shut just as she heard footsteps in the hall behind her. The door was not locked, but Justin just pounded on it anyway.

"God, what do you want?"

"I want in!"

"Well you can't come in. You know you aren't allowed in my room. Besides, I have to get dressed. I'll be out in a while." There was silence and then she heard him stomp away again.

Getting dressed she put on a pink shirt and a pair of jean overalls with a flower on the front. Her long black hair she tied back with a pink hair band into a ponytail revealing her pale face. Her friends all said she should be a Goth, but she still liked dressing like a kid. Besides she was not sure her mother would let her. She had only just let Kate start paining her fingernails pink. So probably not yet at least. Maybe when she was twelve, but at ten she was good as she was. Besides she did not need her parents deciding she was depressed or something.

Slipping on a pair of socks and her shoes she headed for the door, ran out, and hurried downstairs. She saw that the front door was wide open. She wondered why that would be in the middle of the night, but her stomach grumbled so instead of going straight for the TV she headed for the kitchen. They had a big one. Her parents were professional chefs. Her dad Jim had his own restaurant and her mom Wanda worked out of the house as a caterer. So they had everything you could wish in a restaurant. Actually they had expanded the kitchen wall out into what had once been half the living room and the rest into the garage so they would have room for a walk-in freezer and pantry.

To her surprise Kate saw that the light in the kitchen was on. One of her parents must be up too. Not surprising when Justin was making so much noise. She pushed on the swinging door and walked in. Her mom was standing over the sink in her robe with a bunch of raw meat stacked on the counter. Kate had seen it a million times before so she just walked right past her to the cupboard where they kept her cereal and then to the fridge for milk. Then she went to the sin and pushed past her mom to reach up for a bowl without even looking. No sense in it. Wanda would ignore a charging rhino when she was preparing a meal.

While she sat and ate her cereal Kate listened to the sounds of her mother slicing up the meat. She was almost half way through the bowl before she realized something was off. Looking up she saw her mother's back. Her hands were moving and there was the slick sound of cutting meat. But it was followed by a chewing slurping sound. Was her mother eating it? She had seen Wanda cut off a bit of meat and take a bite before, but as she watched her mother's hand… with no glove… reached out and snatched another red lump off the counter, putting it in front of her without putting any sliced meat out.

"Mom, are you okay?" No answer. "Did you look outside? There was a big fire and I think the smoke must be pretty heavy because the moon is all purple. Can I borrow your phone and take a picture of it?" Still no answer. "Mom!"

Setting her spoon down she got up and went to tug on her mother's robe. It was not recommended, but this was getting weird. She was about to call out again when her mom turned to look at her. At least that was what she thought was happening.

Her first hint that something was wrong was when she touched her mother's robe. It was orange and white striped and usually terrycloth. This however felt like leather. Oily leather. It flexed in her hand. Then she looked up and saw "Wanda's" face. Kate immediately began to scream.

Wanda had no eyes. No sockets. No space for them. Her head was round and bulgy with no nose or ears. The only feature was a mouth that stretched across it far too wide. It was still chewing the meat and Kate could see a green tongue and large teeth. Not sharp ones, but all of them were like molars. Made for chewing and grinding. Which they were doing with the meat.

The robe spread open like a pair of wings revealing a body that was more tube shaped and only vaguely human. You could see ribs under the skin and other bones that did not quite fit. The arms were human, but now she saw that the fingers had too many joints. Still holding a hunk of beef they tore it in half with little effort and shoved it into the thing's mouth. The body did not have legs. It ended in a coiled worm-like tail. Most disturbing was the hair on top of its head, just like her mother's.

It reached for her with a free hand, the fingers twitching forward and bending back at odd angles. Kate screamed again and backed up, bouncing off a counter. When she did she hit the wall where her dad's big knives hung. Cleavers and choppers. Things meant for cutting through bones. They rattled and fell to the floor around her as the thing began to uncoil and slither towards her. It hesitated before turning back to the raw meat.

Kate's scream strangled off as she watched it eat. She tried to understand. What was it? Why was it in her house? Why did it look like her mother?

The thing ate fast. Soon it was running out of meat and then the last gob disappeared into its mouth. Now it turned and looked at Kate again. The green tongue stuck out and to her horror she saw an eye in the middle of it. Red and blinking and looking right at her from the open drooling mouth. Raising its hand and flexing its wings it moved towards her with definite intent.

Kate grabbed the handle of one of the knives and got to her feet. It was a huge cleaver. She has to heft it like a baseball bat. "Stay away from me!"

"But Kate I'm so hungry," it said, in her mother's voice. Kate felt tears spring to her eyes as it got closer. You don't want me to be hungry do you? It hurts so much and I need meet Katie. Your delicious meat…"

Most girls Kate's age had never killed anything in their lives. At least not on purpose. Things happened to pets. Hamsters ended up in vacuum cleaners. Fish suddenly looked like they needed baths. And many a kitten went to be buried in the backyard because something seemed like it would be fun to do with them.

Kate's parents on the other hand liked their children to understand where food came from. So while other girls were at scouts cooking marshmallows and singing songs around a campfire while planning the next cookie sale, Kate had been in the woods learning how to make rabbit snares and pit traps. Kate had been taught to kill her prey, skin it, and cook it because if you did not while camping you did not get to eat. It was not a regular thing and she did not kill small animals for fun, but she had dealt the death blow to more than a few furry creatures and fish and birds and once to a fully grown black bear.

The blade swung before she really thought about it and it was a good hit. It went into the thing's side and to her surprise cut through meat and bone like they were not there. Arms and wings fell to the side. The torso was bisected. The tail began to lash along the floor.

The top half fell to the ground with a thump and immediately lay dead, the tongue extended and the eye no longer blinking. All around Kate and splattered across her clothes was blood. Red blood. Monsters, some part of her argued, should not have blood that looked do bloody. It should be yellow or black or something.

In shock at what had just happened Kate stared at the body and the widening pool of blood on her mother's clean white tiled floor. Backing away Kate walked around the isle counter in the middle and headed for the kitchen door. She was still holding the cleaver, pulling it behind her and leaving a red trail. She did not care. She was not really thinking. If she had she might have called for help.

Stunned she instead went and sat on the couch, staring at the blank TV screen. She did not search for the remote. She just stared. Then she began to sob and cry. And after that, everything went dark.

Kate woke up on the couch some time later. There was a bird looking at her. A crow. Smaller than a raven with a yellow beak and everything. Memory came rushing back and she started to scream. That cut off when the crow spoke.

"I wouldn't do that miss. They'll hear you."

Surprised by the talking bird she stifled it. She could hear noises from the kitchen. Had the thing gotten up again? She whispered, "What… who are you?"

"No need to be that quiet. They're eating for now. But they like screams." The bird fluffed its feathers. "I'm a carrion crow." She stared blankly and it tilted its head to the side. "You know much about crows miss? Well we are some of the smarted birds around and we eat dead things. Like vultures and ravens and the like. And sometimes those things include dead people. And when something eats meat that used to be a person, sometimes strange things happen. Now normally animals that kill people are killed pretty quickly themselves. Especially if they do it a lot. But us birds, we get away with it most times. Because we're smart and we only do it once they die on their own. Also we fly away."

"But… why can you talk?"

"I used to hang out on a battlefield. I ate a lot of people. Still do. Sometimes I find a bum or someone who died in the woods or off the side of a road and get there before the ambulance. One day I just… was different. Happens more than you'd think. Back in the old days they would hang people in cages for us." He looked at her. "Like, you eat ham, right?"

"Sure."

"What if the pig had eaten a human being and you knew about it?"

Kate made a face. "Yuck! No way."

"Even if it was years ago?" She shook her head. "Why not?"

"I just… it wouldn't be right."

The bird bobbed its head. "Exactly. There's just something about smart creatures. Probably one of those quantum physics things or magic or something. You can sense it but you can't exactly explain it. Anyway eating people does stuff and nobody talks about it, but you all know it. I've seen TV."

"Like vampires and stuff," Kate said. There were plenty of horror movies about what happened if you killed people. You turned into a monster. She eyed the bird suspiciously. "I've never heard of talking birds outside of movies. I mean besides parrots and things."

"Oh you'll still hear about us in legends and stories, but mostly we keep our beaks shut. You seem like a clever girl. If you were a talking bird, would you let humans know about it?"

Kate had to admit he had a point. "So why are you talking now?"

"Things are getting weird and you're the first normal human I've seen. I can't use the Internet, so I thought I'd see if you lived long enough to ask. If not I'd probably get a meal out of it. Eyeballs are my favorite."

Kate shuddered and looked at the bird. Was it a monster? Then again, did it matter? People died all the time and she had never heard of a flock of birds going on a rampage in real life. She was probably safe for the moment. After what she had seen in the kitchen a small black bird was not very threatening. "Do you know what's going on? I mean I'm talking to a bird and I was just…" She looked at the floor. The cleaver was there, still covered in blood. "There was a monster…"

"There are a lot of monsters right now."

That was not a reassuring statement. "Why?"

"Beats me. Probably something you humans did. Crows would have more sense."

Kate looked around and found the remote control. She turned on the TV, immediately hitting mute, and flipped through the channels. There were some cartoons, a few commercials, and things like that. Then she hit a news program. The studio was empty. It said News at Nine. So the time was right, but she looked out the window. Still dark. She considered why the other TV Shows were still on and realized it was all done automatically. Machines took tapes and discs and put them in players on preprogrammed schedules. The news required real people.

The crow seemed to be thinking the same way. "That is not good, is it?"

Kate felt like she was going to cry again. "What was that thing that attacked me in the kitchen? What else is in there?"

"Oh those things. Well I've seen them before. Not so many, but they pop up now and again. Not sure what you humans call them, but they're… hmm… let me think. They're from other places. Places you humans don't normally see. They don't come near you much these days. They can't unless someone invites them in and they can't stay unless they beat someone in a fight or at riddle games or in challenges. It's called… um… rite of conquest or some such. It's all about territory like with animals. They also have problems with sunlight and metal." It looked down at her cleaver. "Good choice of weapon you have there. Solid metal. Sharp. Heavy. Wish I could use one of those."

It had been remarkably easy to kill that monster, especially considering how easily it had taken apart the meat. She had chopped bones before. Usually you had to either saw through them or be pretty strong. Either way not something she should have been able to do.

"You said I'm the only normal person you've seen. Where have you checked?"

"All over my territory. About twenty or thirty miles. As the crow flies."

Kate did not want to ask. "What about… in here?"

"In this house? Well it smells like people, but I also smell a lot of blood and monsters. Not just in the kitchen."

Kate felt her lip tremble. "How… why…?" She did not know what to ask. She finally asked, "How do I get rid of them?"

"Kill them. Once you do your house should be safe at least. Though you may want to hurry it up. Things are starting to look weird…"

Kate looked around. He was right. The house looked sort of the same. At least enough hat like with her mother she had not noticed the changed, but now that he pointed it out she realized it was different. There were more stairs. The wallpaper was sort of torn. Like the walls were growing. She could hear ominous groaning. "What's going on?"

"It's their place now. It's changing for them. Not as fast as some houses I've seen. Guess they haven't claimed all of it. You didn't invite them into your room, did you?"

"No I…" She remembered her brother banging on the doors. At least, it had sounded like her brother. "Why would that matter?"

"I think it has to do with how you see the world. Humans are territorial. You care about funny things. You'll support your country, and then argue with your neighbor or people from another town over a football game. You love your families and would kill if someone broke into your house, but then defend your own rooms to the death against them if you can. I think to own the whole house and make it theirs, they need you."

It's all about how we see the world? She looked outside. "How do you see the world? Is the moon really purple?"

"What's purple?"

Kate started to explain and stopped. Dogs did not see in color. Did birds? She had an aunt who could not tell the difference between red and green. Figuring out if she was seeing things the same way as a bird seemed complicated.

Something moved by the kitchen and she turned and screamed. She could not help it. The thing crawling out was a hideous flesh colored giant spider and as it left the kitchen it looked at her with her father's face in the middle of its thorax. He smiled at her and said, There you are Katie. Your mother's not feeling well. How about you feed your old man?" The spider-face up front had no eyes, but it did have fangs dripping with something that sizzled when it hit the floor.

Kate's teacher had told her giant spiders were impossible. That anything with an exoskeleton that size would collapse under its own weight. This thing on the other hand suddenly leapt forward with the ease of a ballerina and landed on the couch only because it was all the separated it from her.

Still screaming Kate rolled off the cushions just in time to avoid being bit, the fangs hitting the sofa instead. The crow also flew up, flipping across the room to land on the TV. The human face on its back glared at her and shouted, "Hold still!"

Kate grabbed her cleaver and the monster froze. "I'll kill you if you come closer."

"You won't do that. You're my little Katie." It moved forward and she swung. It missed by a mile, but the spider froze. "Now Kate, you should put that down. You're not well."

"What?"

"You're seeing things sweetie." The face smiled. "Something has gone wrong and you're crazy. You killed your own mother. Just chopped her up."

"No I… that wasn't my mother…" But she was uncertain. She looked at the crow. "Am I crazy? Am I dreaming?"

The bird said, "I know a bit about humans and it seems to me that any answer I could give is going to be suspect because I'm a talking bird and— _Look out!_"

The spider jumped again and Kate swung her cleaver upwards, trying to block. Instead it sliced through the thing in a spray of blood and it landed on top of her. It must have weighed a couple hundred pounds, but fortunately half of it was on top of the coffee table so after some wriggling she was able to get loose and slip under it. Standing up she looked down at the unmoving face of her father, still grinning in its back.

Kate pinched herself. The easiest explanation was that she was dreaming. But either she was in a coma or she was not asleep. Either way she really wished she would wake up, but it was not happening.

Using the cleaver she poked the spider. Where the metal touched it, it sizzled like the spider's venom was still doing on the carpet. She looked at the crow. Okay, giant spider and talking bird. "Tell me the truth, is this thing my father?"

"Does your father normally have eight legs?"

"No," she said. She was not sure if confirmation on what she was seeing was a good thing coming from something that might also be madness.

"I think maybe it _was_," the bird said uncertainly. "Or part of it was. Things like this… well let's just say 'you are what you eat' is not just pretty words. I should know."

"So am I crazy?"

"I just met you."

Had she somehow snapped? She tried to think. On TV kids usually went crazy because they were abused or saw something horrible. As far as she could tell the horrible stuff had only begun since she started seeing all of this. She did not remember anyone in her family touching her inappropriately. Unless she blocked it out.

No matter how she looked at it though, the spider refused to be anything other than a spider with her dad's face on its back. Did it just look like her dad or was the crow right and it had eaten him? It seemed to know her name, but if she was crazy, it would. Was she imagining the whole thing or had she just murdered her own parents like it had been saying?

There was a rumble the fireplace shifted. The wall moved with it not cracking but shifting to accommodate. Now it was taller, bigger, and the bricks were changing from red to black. Inside she could not see the bricks behind the opening though. It was just dark. And it sounded like it was breathing. She reached over and turned on a light. This did not help.

"I hope you aren't planning on going in there."

"I'm not that crazy," she said. All of this seemed impossible. Which supported the "I've snapped" theory. On the other hand, she had only her own senses and everything certainly seemed to be happening. She sure was not sticking her head in there.

"What are you going to do?" The bird said.

"I'm not sure. Give me a minute to think." She looked at the spider. Then she walked over to the kitchen and peered inside. The body was still there, but there was definitely less of it. The spider's mouth looked like a spider's, so why were there chunks missing? It must have used the other mouth, the one that looked like her dad. Or she was imagining it all.

She backed out into the living room again and considered. Then she heard something moving upstairs. Her brother's voice called out, "Kate? Are you still in your room Kate?"

Her mouth tightened. "No, I'm down here." Her hands gripped the handle of her weapon tight. "Do you want to see me about something?"

"Yes. Please… come on up. I have a surprise for you."

It sounded just like him. No malevolence. Which she supposed was a clue. Justin was kind of an ass. He would step in if someone else was picking on her, older brother that he was, but she got more wet willies and wedgies from him than she ever had from anyone else. If it was her birthday she would not expect him to get her a surprise or be polite about it. In th dark of night that should have been day and covered in congealing blood, she did not believe it for a second.

"I'll be right up."

She headed for the stairs. The crow said, "Are you sure that's a good idea?"

"You said I had to kill them all." That was that.

Her mother kept a lot of family photos on the wall by their stairs. As she passed them Kate saw that they had changed. The pictures of her mother and father now matched the monsters she had killed, still smiling out of the frames. She looked normal, smiling like nothing was wrong. Her brother looked different too. He did not fit in the frames. She saw pieces of red skin and a clawed hand.

"Oh that's not good…" She passed the mirror at the top of the stairs. It was in a frame just like the photographs and her mother usually used it to check her makeup on her way down the stairs. As she passed it though Kate saw herself. Only her reflection stopped to watch as she kept moving. She paused and stared at the smiling face. It was not a monster, but it was not moving with her like it should either. "What do you want?"

"You," was the reply and a hand reached out of the mirror and grabbed her ponytail.

Screaming again, her throat getting hoarse, Kate pulled back. Then she got angry. It was not like this was the first time someone unexpectedly grabbed her hair. She slammed her fist down on the mirror thing's elbow and it let go. She then brought the handle of the knife up and hit the mirror.

It cracked. There was an inhuman scream and the arm dropped to the floor. The mirror was shattered and covered in blood. The arm, which looked just like hers, lay on the stairs. She kicked it aide, incase it somehow started moving. Then she set her jaw and turned down the hallway. She needed to end this.

Justin's door opened on its own as she passed her own door. From inside was a flickering blue light, as if his TV was on. But there was no sound. She gave the bathroom and the mirrors inside a wide berth as she walked cautiously towards it, the blade of her cleaver leaving a bloody line as she dragged it across the carpet. It looked so strange. Her parents would have gone crazy if they saw this.

Justin was a huge hulking figure squatting in the middle of the floor. The room was a lot bigger inside than it had been before. The light in his ceiling fan was glowing and flickering blue instead of the way it normally looked. Maybe eight or nine feet tall if it had stood up. His face was where it should be, but he no longer had a neck. Just a head that rose from his shoulders like a hill. She was pretty sure nodding and shaking his head were out. Two horns stuck out of his temples and his body was a mass of twisted muscle with a long tentacle-like tail and cloven hooves. It could still smile though and instead of teeth the mouth was full of black tentacles.

"I've been waiting for you little sister."

"I'm not your sister."

It said, "You will be."

"I killed the others. I'll kill you too."

"That doesn't matter. Even if you survive your world is doomed. There are more of us than you and now that we are finally here we will never stop. Your own people invited us. As so many have before on worlds beyond your imagining."

Kate thought about that. "I didn't invite you." She hefted the knife to her shoulder. "I want you to go back where you came from."

"This is where we came from. When your kind had not yet crawled from the seas we ruled this world. Before there was light. Before gravity. Before your stupid idiotic rules." Its tentacles writhed in its mouth. It was so full she wondered how it could talk. "We've spent so long locked away in your nightmares, whispering in your ears waiting for you to bring us back, and now that we are free we will never leave again."

It stood and Kate felt her heart shudder. But for once she did not scream. She was done screaming. This thing looked so unreal she could pretend it was not. Maybe she was crazy. A sane person would not have rushed forward and swung a cleaver at something that looked so like her brother even as it reached down to grab her. Large claws fingers fell around her as she swung and it roared and hissed and gurgled before her blade found its shins. Then it fell like a tree.

Kate kept chopping at it. It was like hitting gelatin. The blade seemed to pass through it like it was nothing. It tried to fight back, but nothing it could do would stop the blade. When it realized force was not working it began to beg. In her brother's voice. "Please, stop. It's me, Justin. I broke free. You're crazy. Stop. I'll give you anything. Stop!" She took the head off at the jaw, aiming for the tentacles. They practically flared up like flash paper in a magic show when it hit and the thing fell silent.

Dripping with blood from head to toe she made her way silently back into the hallway. She went back to the bathroom. Without pausing she slammed her bloody knife into the mirror, not waiting to see if it attacked. Then she got back in the shower. She left the door open and took the blade with her.

Clean and in new clothes, a blue velvet dress that she had gotten specifically for picture day, from her room she returned downstairs and found the crow pecking at the dead spider. Just in time to see it pluck one of her father's eyes from the back. She had checked her parents' room. There had been a lot of blood. No bodies. She closed the door and tried to decide what to do next. When she had checked on her brother's body, it had still been there, but the room was smaller. The crow was right, her house was changing back.

It was still full of deal monsters though. Her family was gone and Kate did not try looking for them. She was afraid she would find them.

She walked out to the back yard and looked around. Nothing moved, but she saw something odd about the doghouse. She turned on the porch light and what she saw almost broke her.

Max was her mother's dog. A little dust mop that was part cocker spaniel and part whatever jumped the fence. At least he had been. Now he was gutted with his body stretched out over his doghouse. Had this been the first victim? Max got out sometimes, they were not sure how, and always came back to the front door, scratching to be let in. Any of them would have opened the door and told him to come inside.

Kate felt more tears coming. This seemed to real. Part of her could believe, despite everything, that her parents were still alive somewhere. But a dog… a dog died so easily. You expected it.

She flinched as the crow landed on her shoulder. It looked at the mess. "Can I eat that?"

Before Kate could answer Max's head moved to look at her. Perched on top of an exposed rib cage on a body that had been spread out, skinned, and basically looked like a frog that had been dissected and put on display. "I'm not dead Kate. I'm right here. Come on, come pet my belly."

Kate felt something in her go cold. Dogs do not talk. Dead dogs especially. Talking crows apparently being an exception. But this. This was sick. A twisted joke by something that had made itself look like her dog. Her dead dog. She knew what demonic possession was. Maybe that was it. Or maybe this was something that had eaten her beloved pet. Or maybe she was crazy. She did not care any more. Something needed to pay.

"Start with the eyes," she told the crow. The spread out dog bits cried out and whimpered convincingly, but she was done listening as she turned and went back inside.

The body parts started to smell after a few hours. Kate may have reclaimed her house, but she realized it was no longer her home. She tried calling the cops. There was an automated message after a few rings. She left a message saying there had been a murder. No details. If she was crazy she really did not want to get blamed.

Nobody showed up.

Outside the purple moon had not moved. The cloud she had seen before had moved off, but now she could see the thing inside it a little better. It looked like a giant version of what she had seen in Justin's mouth. On the weather channel the clock said it had been six hours.

Chopping the bodies into pieces she got her dad's shovel out of the shed and went to the back yard. The ground was pretty soft. She dug a couple shallow graves. Then she began burying the pieces. Just as she was finishing up something tried to slither out of the grave of the thing that had looked like her mother. Kate calmly hit it with the shovel and watched it shrivel up and go back underground before she stuck the tool in the loose dirt over it.

Were they really dead? Or just waiting to rise up? She had no way of knowing.

Kate looked in the kitchen and made herself a dinner of hot dogs, sharing some with the crow. Then she went to her room and tried to sleep, but it did not last long. She had nightmares, even in the supposed safety of her bed. Not surprising.

When she realized sleep was impossible she began to pack. She grabbed one of her brother's backpacks from a closet. His were bigger than hers. She gathered food, a few changes of cloths, and a lot of the kitchen knives. She found some old rope and sort of tied her cleaver to her back.

"Would you like to come with me?" She asked the crow.

"Where are you going?"

"I don't know. I think I'll just keep walking. I don't expect to live long."

"Then why go anywhere?"

"The way I see it, either I'm crazy and I just killed my parents and brother. Or I'm having some kind of crazy nightmare. Or this is real. Any way you slice it, staying here is not going to turn out well for me. More of those things might come and even if they cannot get in if I cannot leave I'll starve eventually. I'll do better where I can run away. I hope." She looked at the bird and said, "The thing that looked like my brother said that we got rid of them before. Do you think we can do it again?"

"It won't bring your parents back."

"I know," she said. "I'd settle for seeing the sun again." The night should have been a lot colder by now. The air still felt warm. Was half the planet on fire, burned by a never moving sun? Or were there new rules? Not that she expected to get too far.

Crazy, dreaming, or in a whole new world. Kate had no idea which if any of those options was what was happening. By now she was only sure that there was no way out. She had seen enough TV series and movies where this sort of thing happened to know there was no way out. That short of beating some ultimate monster and earning her freedom, she was screwed. If she went back into her house, cleaned everything, and even managed to get out the blood stains, it would just look normal until something showed up and showed it was all a joke. That something was waiting to grab her or rip away the world again right when she thought things might be settling down.

So she planned to go out. Get eaten. Fight monsters. Look for other people if there were any left. See if anyone had any idea what was happening or if one of the monsters would drop another hint or two. School was probably out. A bunch of unarmed children herded into rows? Monsters would consider that a buffet. If she was crazy, all she would see would be monsters. Since Kate had no intention of letting them attack her, if she was crazy it would just mean she was slaughtering her fellow classmates. It might be considered a good thing to go there and "free them" from whatever those things were doing, but she had done that for her own family. Let their parents take care of that.

Hefting her pack she tried to think where to go and decided to head towards the library. She had seen a book there on surviving a zombie apocalypse. It might not cover everything, but it could not hurt. She had no better ideas. "You coming?"

The bird flew over and perched on her shoulder. "I can't say having a murder-ape with opposable thumbs and an arsenal seems like a bad thing. Some of these things can fly. So sure, we'll keep going until we get eaten. That's how most birds live anyway."

Kate was not sure she trusted the bird. It was weird. It could be just another monster playing with her or using her and any second it would turn into something slimy that would attack her face. Eat her eyes or crawl down her throat.

So far that had not happened. The bird was the only one talking to her who seemed to know anything. It had also helped her. Even if it was a monster, she did not know that made it automatically bad. From what the thing upstairs said humans were behind this anyway, something she could easily believe. A satanic cult? Some scientist in a bunker somewhere poking holes in the world with some new gizmo? An idiot with a magic lamp?

If nothing else she wanted to find that person, or whatever was left of them, and deliver a swift kick to their ass. She could cuss now, she decided. It was not like it was going to make anything worse

From the dark things watched her. Things with eyes. Those without. Things with senses beyond what a human or even a bird could discern. The girl seemed like another weak human, but she smelled of death to them. No amount of cleaning could wash that away. She carried weapons they feared. The bird with her was not normal either. It was different and for many of them this whole world was new and dangerous. For others they remembered the last time they thought this world had been theirs. They were in and they intended to stay. They were confident and powerful. Surely this world would fall to them once again and they would rule supreme.

All the same they stayed in the shadows and watched as the little girl in her dress walked down the silent street reeking of death and blood and the determination to kill again. Every now and then her eyes would scan the shadows and they would back up, some closing glowing eyes, holding their breath and waiting until she moved on. Others felt their patience fraying and it would only be a matter of time before they would test her and see if she was truly all that dangerous.

Up above something flew in front of the purple moon. It was gone so fast that anyone watching would have questioned if they saw it at all. All that was left was that lonely familiar yet changed orb reflecting light from some new unknown source down on a world that had changed a great deal in a very short time.

**The End & The Beginning… **

**Author's Note**

**If you like these check out my books on Amazon, particularly "Slasher School Days", "Dragon" and "24/7"**


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